Slightly foxed, but still desirable : Ronald Searle's wicked world of book collecting
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Slightly foxed, but still desirable : Ronald Searle's wicked world of book collecting
Souvenir, c1989
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Description and Table of Contents
Description
As any, even vaguely addicted book collector will have swiftly learned, most booksellers' catalogues are written in a parallel language that can fool anyone but the cognoscenti and which makes the mysteries of the Rosetta Stone look like something out of Enid Blyton. Without a smattering of inside information, the baffled but hopelessly-bitten book buyer is drifting unarmed and unprepared into a minefield whose perilous complexities will usually only be made plain when an eagerly awaited parcel of dream volumes arrives and the mangled contents are revealed in all their deceptive glory...
But all is not lost. Help is at hand!
After a lifetime of avidly scanning the frequently poisonously-tinted pages of innumerable book catalogues, Ronald Searle has become expert in the art of decoding those esoteric, poetic, and usually approximate, descriptions of literary come-ons. Now, licking his wounds, he publishes his heard-earned findings in this fully illustrated pioneer guide, designed to foil the devious machinations of scheming and wicked booksellers for ever more.
No longer will the innocent book collector need to puzzle over the finer meaning of 'old half roan', 'good working copy', 'blind tooled' or 'tail-edged shaved'. The unvarnished truth is here exposed at last, both in the shockingly explicit drawings and in the devastatingly frank glossary whose revelations will startle even the most battle-scarred of bibliophiles.
The result is one of the funniest, most entertaining books to have emerged from the brilliantly perceptive pen of the master. No book collector, and certainly no bookseller, can afford to be without it - even the wicked ones.
by "Nielsen BookData"