This is one of the strangest items we've ever had in stock, The Family Tree or, The Hoax-o-Graph, published around 1913 by Dow and Lester, the firm that was also responsible for Cecil Henland's famous novelty album The Ghosts of My Friends. This unusual little book is based on the album amicorum, or friendship album, in which friends and family write their signatures or meaningful inscriptions - a bit like signing your high school yearbook. The practice originated with European academics in the 16th century, and was popular among the middle classes during the late Geor ..read more

Today I'm proud to release my first major catalogue, A Hunger of the Mind: Four Centuries of Women and Science, published jointly with Deborah Coltham Rare Books. It contains books by famous scientists such as Marie Curie and Jane Goodall, but also focuses on lesser-known women. Many of these researchers weren’t household names but contributed enormously to their fields, and others were popular science writers, educators, translators, entrepreneurs, explorers, and activists. The catalogue shows that, despite the obstacles placed in their way, women have always engaged with science. A ..read more

Our new email catalogue was released today, and one of the stand-out items is this rare and exquisitely articulated right hand and arm by J. Gillingham & Son, the UK’s most important prosthetics firm of the 19th and early 20th centuries and “the equivalent today of some of the most advanced companies working on prosthetics” (BBC documentary Pioneering Prosthetics in the West Country, June 15th, 2017). Other than the Chard Museum, we can locate only one Gillingham limb in an institutional collection, at the Science Museum of Victoria, Australia, and none others in auction records. The firm ..read more

Did you have these books as a kid? I did, too! And I had no idea until a few years ago just how revolutionary they were, or that the Dinosaur volume was written by an important palaeontologist. Let’s start with the books themselves. The publisher, Dorling Kindersley, was founded in London 1974, and in the ‘80s they began taking advantage of new design technology to radically revise the page layouts of children’s books. As they explained in 1997, the goal was to “slow down the pictures and speed up the text” —  to make space for children to explore information in their own way rather ..read more

You wouldn’t normally think of scientific illustrations as ‘cute’, but that’s one of the reasons I bought this book, An Attempt Toward a Natural History of the Polype by Henry Baker. The adorable creatures featured in are freshwater polyps – more commonly known as hydra – tiny aquatic organisms related to the corals, anemones, and jellyfish. The hydra has an amazing ability that has fascinated scientists for nearly three hundred years: they can completely regenerate when cut into pieces. The first person to report on this was the scientist Abraham Trembley, who presented his finding ..read more

Content advisory: anti-Semitism. On September 2nd, 1939, a British woman named Marjorie True began a new diary with the chilling words, "On the verge of war. Germany bombed Warsaw & has marched into Poland at several points”. Over the next two years she recorded her experiences of the war in a detailed and revealing journal that also serves as a photo album. True chronicles international events alongside her work staffing an ambulance station with the Women's Voluntary Service, but also describes local goings-on, private and public sentiment, and rumours. She closely follows th ..read more

The intersection of art and science is one of my favourite areas to explore, and this manuscript on caterpillars (now sold) is a fantastic example of the types of things I look for. It was made in Northamptonshire, primarily between 1887 and 1896 (with additions up to 1938), and contains 137 pages of original observations on local caterpillars illustrated with artistically accomplished watercolours made to scale. Notes in natural history manuscripts are often copied from authoritative sources, but in this case the observations are unusually original and thoughtful, with only o ..read more

This interactive tin toy is a remarkable relic of the Cold War and one of the most unusual items I've had in stock.  It was designed as a distant early warning station, complete with a radar “scope” showing the silhouettes of a moving planes, as well as a rotating radar dish and blinking lights, and morse code “signal key” that could be tapped out with a buzzing sound. The toy was made by the famed Masudaya firm of Tokyo, which was founded in 1923 and became the leading producer of battery and mechanical-operated toys during the post-war period (fabtintoys.com). This toy has been t ..read more

  Are you a houseplant person? So were the Victorians! Many hobbies involving plants became popular during the 19th century, such as collecting and pressing flowers. Using plants decoratively in the home was a huge craze, encompassing both potted plants and arrangements of cut flowers and greenery. Ferns were particularly popular, to the point that some species actually became threatened in the wild, and this was also the period when Christmas trees became widespread in Britain and the US. Floral Decorations for the Dwelling House, by Annie Hassard, was first published in ..read more

Today the women workers of the Second World War – represented by Rosie the Riveter and the 'We Can Do It' poster – loom large in the popular consciousness. But fewer people are aware of the huge role that women played in the labor force during the First World War, working in a wide variety of previously male-dominated industries. We recently acquired a remarkable record of their importance on the home front in Britain: Women's War Work, a publication of the War Office that contains seventy-two evocative and rarely-seen photos of female labourers. Very quickly after the outbreak of ..read more