Please Buy This Book
Description
PLEASE BUY THIS BOOK is the first comprehensive guide to Charity Gift Books ? books in which the contributors gave their work for free and from which all profits went to charity.
It's a wide field, from exquisite productions made in tiny numbers through to expensive trade editions and mass-market picture books. Back in the 19th and 20th centuries, a charity could raise money through selling a book ? almost always a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book in which the beautiful pictures were accompanied by written contributions from the famous.
In many homes, these lovely books were the most beautiful in the house. Normally, a compilation of full-page pictures from famous artists, short stories by famous writers, specially commissioned poems and pages of sheet music, 'private' photographs (of the famous again), autographs and scraps of facsimile handwriting would be beyond an ordinary person's means. But not these. The books sold in large numbers (usually) and can still be found in second-hand bookshops ? at affordable prices. They make a great collection for anyone with a passion for books today.
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Person
James Havers is an editor at Prospero Books. He has a collection of well over three thousand ink-on-paper books,housed in a room lined with custom-built bookshelves and, in deference or perhaps out of sheer cussedness, he refuses to take his e-reader into his library, keeping that room sacred to books that can be held, fondled and, with some of the older volumes, smelt.
