Tens of millions of Britons learnt to read with the Peter and Jane books. In her second piece for The Dabbler, Ladybird expert Helen Day examines how the books - and their revisions - reflected British middle-class life, or an ideal of it... Do the words 'Peter and Jane' take you back ... Read More...
General
Like all businesses, bookselling would be fine if it wasn't for the customers. Here Steerforth sets out his Browser's Charter for people who would presume to enter a bookshop... When booksellers get together what do we talk about? Books? Yes, sometimes - I remember waking up on someone's floor after a ... Read More...
While the rest of the world thinks it's Valentine's Day, at The Dabbler we know that the real significance of today is that it marks the 250th anniversary of Percy's Reliques. Prof Nick Groom explains how the seminal collection of ballads kickstarted the British folk tradition... On 14 February 1765 – St ... Read More...
'If I’m a failed smoker it’s not because I haven’t tried...' - Douglas is talking tobacco... My wife had a teenage crush on James Dean. She confided it to her father who latched onto the idea and bought her anything he could find bearing the beloved likeness. Grateful for his generosity, ... Read More...
Helen Day is the curator of surely the most authorative website about Ladybird Books on the net. Her knowledge of and enthusiasm for the children's educational classics has seen her feature in newspaper articles, radio shows and TV documentaries. In the first of a series of posts for The Dabbler, ... Read More...
In which Nick Cave describes a Kylie Minogue pop hit as 'a harrowing portrait of humanity not dissimilar to that of the Old Testament Psalms'... While writing a piece for sofa.com about the album The Boatman’s Call by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, I came across this quite stupendous lecture ... Read More...
As everyone who has ever worked anywhere knows, the worst bit of any business is the customers. Here, Steerforth recalls the most absurd questions he was asked when working as a bookseller... The following is a real-life encounter I had with a customer when I was a fledgling bookseller: Customer - I ... Read More...
A chance reading about a little boy abandoned at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair gets Douglas thinking... According to Erik Larsen in The Devil in the White City, visitors to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair [above] were able to drop their children at an official daycare and retrieve them by claim ... Read More...
Mark Pack is addicted to writing Amazon reviews. But what are they really for?... I first started writing book reviews purely for my personal benefit: to help me remember more about the books I had read. Even now, with the subsequent explosion of online reviews, the aspects of a book I ... Read More...
They simply wrote a lot of popular children's books about a family of bears. So how did the Berenstain's manage to enrage two quite different sets of modern moralists?... Usually the death of a prominent person is greeted with respectful appraisal. After a while it fades, but initially “don’t speak ill ... Read More...