vintage textiles book covers

at the schools where i work we have loads of awesome resources and books. here's some pamphlets & reference books with ace covers :)

new old books

This weekend we went to one of my fave 2nd hand spots, a house-clearance yard in croydon. originally looking for some furniture, nothing was quite right so we had a trawl through the books instead. they have probably the best selection of vintage books you have ever seen! (and they price things by eying up the armful you bring up to the cash-desk!)

above: 1960 card trick book
above: 1952 penguin handbook
above: Nurses' exercise book from 1965. i found this so intriguing- the content is all like the below image; annotated pictures for different types of equipment setups. Many of them are pretty gross which probably arent used anymore!! (i'll leave it to your imagination!)

More books

Just a few more lovely book covers. Mum and dad were having a clear out and offered them to me before they went to the charity shop
Above: 1966 Guinness World Record book. I was really hoping it would be full of awesome colour plates of mad stuff, but its just chocka block with tiny writing and facts- lol. Cool cover design tho.
Below: My recorder book from when I was a kid! It's a handmedown from a family friend. Published 1950

Penguin book of Kites- 1976. Love everything about this- even the unusual square format.
Below: mad ~Canals Book~ from 1975! Who knows why my parents had this little treasure!
Lastly, here's some pretty flowers

The Formal Exercises of Karate

Found this little gem in our local charity shop. The official manual of the Japan Karate Association! printed 1973. I'm obsessed and fascinated with the use of limited colour in print. Black and orange are used to great effect in the instructions, using photographs, illustrations and arrows.

"Ki-ai!"

half term

I haven't written a blog in almost a month-- and i wonder why my stats are slow?? haha idiot. busy stuff at the moment.

i've been taking loads of photos recently- only problem is, they're all on a roll from my diana mini, 70-odd photos from the past month waiting to be processed!

above: lovely little vintage tin bought for me by my colleague.

Bank holiday weekend was spent visiting out friend in Bristol. first time I've ever been and it was lovely! Will write more about our weekend when i get my stupid photos developed-- but here's two nice little book purchases. Daniel bought Frontier of the Unknown for himself as a holiday book- the tagline "a novel of the men of the future working in a nuclear plant" sounds exciting, but the blurb on the back less so! I was really impressed with the lovely overlapping handdrawn futuristic dial panels, though. and the typography!



Tales of the Greek Heroes- bought this comprehensive book to help us with our weekly pub quiz (always an inevitable question about Greek myths!) and got a double whammy with this lovely illustrated cover. The colouring is great, and each chapter has a nice line drawing header, too.


Below is a little snippet of the elements in our wedding invites ive now completed. Theyre at the printers as I write!

Had a wander around our local area to a very nice pub and the nearby churchyard and fields. Discovered we have hidden alottments in our town! we poked our heads in and saw a rabbit nibbling on someone's lettuces... poor gardeners! I liked the handpainted sign in the communal hut.

Lastly I picked some daisies from our walk.


Must hurry up and get my photos developed!

poster for the performance degree people at my uni. i'm well proud i constructed alllll of this in photoshop, putting together each element from separate ink drawings. ok i didnt do it all myself, i got a lot of help from Dan. but now i know how to do it! woo!
also guess what. found this in a charity shop on the weekend. it really was fate

<3

excuse me while i go and cry about how pretty these are!

i saw them in waterstones last week, they have brought out a new set of penguin classics with these beautiful hardbacks. the patterns are embossed into the fabric covers, soooo luxurious. beautiful

they don't make them like they used to

Books in my parent's bookcase