Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, published between 1589 and 1600, will always be the primary source for the history of early English exploration, as well as one of the gems of Elizabethan letters. We have a set of the fine 12-volume "Maclehose" edition, here.

Our London colleague and European consultant to Hordern House, Anthony Payne, is a respected authority on Hakluyt and the author of numerous studies. His latest piece of...

The online cultural magazine Broadsheet described us recently as "ripped from a booklover’s wildest dreams, complete with magnifying glass, Persian carpets and leather-bound chairs. It’s the ideal setting to pore over centuries-old titles". See their article and photographs here. 

From the renowned Shakespeare and Co in Paris to bookshops in San Francisco, New Delhi and India, correspondents of the Financial Times in a recent article tell the stories of booksellers around the world who have defied the pandemic.  Adapting to a world in lockdown these booksellers have beaten the odds to communicate in new and creative ways, charting the rise of online events, mailings and catalogues to reach new and established booklovers and buyers.

A striking bookplate: Alexander Grant, Scottish and English parliamentarian from his copy (signed and dated by him, 1697) of the surviving works of Dionysius Halicarnarssensis, one of the primary sources for the accounts of the foundation of Rome and the myth of Romulus and Remus. A handsome printing in in Greek and Roman types mostly in parallel of Dionysius, the Greek historian and rhetorician who moved to Rome around 30 BCE and flourished during the...

Lubberland is a place of dreams, where ‘streets are pavd with pudding-pies,’ and ‘hot roasted pigs’ that ‘run up and down, still crying out, Come eat me’. ‘The rivers run with claret fine, the brooks with rich canary’. ‘Hot custards grows on eery tree, each ditch...

Some years ago, we sold a flyleaf that had been excised by a previous owner from a seventeenth-century book. On it, in a neat hand, appeared a charming six-line poem that we know now – thanks to digital access to first line records – to be an unpublished and otherwise unrecorded poem. So, we record it here: 

St Winifred made a vow in haste,
That she would live a virgin chaste,
That vow for ever...