Stella & Rose's Books

Who has not heard of A Child's Garden of Verses? Probably very few... 

But how many would associate this delightful collection of poetry with the exciting and romantic adventure story Treasure Island, or the much darker and most famous study of the abysmal depths of personality The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? All came from the pen and fertile imagination of the Scottish writer and poet Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 into a family more famous for engineering than for literary prowess - his father, Thomas, invented the marine dynamometer, which measures the force of waves, and his grandfather, also a Robert, was Britain's greatest builder of lighthouses.

Rose's Books recently acquired a collection of books by Elsie J. Oxenhamwhich includes several of the hard to find titles. I find it exciting looking through a new collection and often glance through a few of the books, which is how I came to read The Abbey Girls in Town. Before coming to work here I knew nothing about Oxenham but I quickly learnt that she was the author of the very collectable Abbey series. Until recently I had not knowingly read any of her books. I say 'knowingly' as I think I read one of my mother's books but I can't remember the title or anything about it other than the girls in the book did lots of country dancing!

What links Egyptian Birds, Bonnie Scotland, Children and War?

The answer is that they are among the ninety-two 20/- (20 shillings) series of Colour Books published by A. & C. Black between 1901 and 1921. The Edwardian period was, perhaps, the peak time for book illustrations as, although photography was well established, the black and white images could not match the brilliance of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac and their contemporaries for colour illustrations. The A. & C. Black's 20/- series used water-colour artists and was the first to use the new "three colour" process for colour plates. The books were lavish in their use of colour illustrations with most volumes having 70 or more colour plates.

'Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.'

So begins the extraordinary obituary that appeared in the New York Tribune following the death of the pioneer American author and critic in 1849. Signed by “Ludwig”, the writer of this obituary was soon identified as Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an editor and critic that had borne a grudge against Poe since the early 1840s. But Griswold did not stop at the obituary: he arranged for himself to become Poe's literary executor, and set out to destroy the author's reputation in a breathtaking series of forgeries and revisions to Poe's writings. Although denounced by those who knew Poe, Griswold's biography (the only one available) was accepted by much of the general public, who no doubt were titillated by the thought of reading the words of an 'evil' man.

It was the illustrations that first drew me to Helen Bradley’s books. There is such detail in them that they almost tell the story without the need for words. Helen Bradley depicts ‘how things were’ in the 1900’s. She began to paint when her grandchildren asked what life was like when she was a child. Her paintings certainly bring to life the Edwardian era of her childhood. So if you, like me, like to read history in story books this is one for you!

Helen Bradley was born in November 1900 at 58 High Street, Lees near Oldham. This had been a rural area but the cotton mills had spread out from Oldham and instead of fields were rows of back-to-back houses, some of them built by Helen’s grandfathers.

The author, Thomas Wester, is a Swedish photographer with a splendid love ofcats. Cats have been his subject of choice for over twenty years. He started his photography at the end of the 1960's and five years later he acquired his first cat. His love and interest in cats escalated from then on. Wester was encouraged in his work by friends and colleagues and many of his pictures were published in magazines and newspapers. When he found that more people were writing to him about his cat photographs than any of his other pictures, he started to think about publishing a book of photographs of cats. 

In putting together this book, his aim was to draw away from the common trend of photographing 'cuddly kittens in full colour with silk bows, sitting on turquoise paper', similar to those seen in today's coffee table books. He wanted to take photographs of cats in their natural surroundings, in natural poses, simply going about their everyday life.