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Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 5:06 pm| Quote: |
| From The Times
May 13, 2006 Shop talk You need never grow up at this specialist in children’s titles LIKE A HOVERING kestrel, Heather Lawrence swoops on her prey. “I’ve never spotted that before,” she says, pulling out a copy of Meet the Kilburys!, a girls’ school adventure. The interest isn’t so much the book as its dust jacket of two girls on a motorcycle. “We have a customer in America who collects books with motorbikes on the cover,” Heather explains. She and her husband Jeff run Peakirk Books in a former smithy in rural Cambridgeshire, with its big skies and farm signs advertising “sprouting broc”. The landscape is relevant to one of their specialisations: John Clare, the “Northamptonshire peasant poet”, was born two miles down the road. Collectors will pay up to £500 for each of the first four editions of his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, all from 1820. Collectable children’s books, the Lawrences’ other specialisation, come cheaper, although a good copy of The Adventures of Wonk, a strange koala bear, can fetch £50. The first floor, with its Winnie the Pooh rug, is a treasure house of childhood memories: Biggles, Bunter, Jennings, Just William, Chalet School, Rupert Bear, Famous Five, Secret Seven, Nauseous Nine (OK, I made that last one up). “People send us thank you letters for reuniting them with books from their childhoods,” Heather says. “I once read out virtually the whole of one book to someone over the phone and she was almost in tears. We have professors who want Noddy annuals for pure nostalgia. When you read these books, you’re a child again.” The Lawrences started on the internet in 1997 and opened the shop two years later, after discovering that “the net can be a bit of a lonely business . . . and anyway, people often say: ‘You don’t know what you want until you see it on a shelf’.” At this point I unearth I-Spy On a Train Journey, part of my own childhood. Every page is familiar but I never did spot a platelayer’s hut (10 points). Contact: Railway Cottage, St Pegas Road, Peakirk, Peterborough; 01733 253182; www.peakirkbooks.com Prize exhibit: A first edition of Clare’s The Village Minstrel, in a case labelled “Please handle with loving care”. £550. Hard to shift: Reader’s Digest condensed books: “We give them to charity shops, who sell them for the bindings.” Best customer story: After 40 years searching for Enid Blyton’s Merry Story Book, a collector found it here. He lived four miles away. “He said: ‘What am I going to look for now’?” Jeff says. STEPHEN McCLARENCE |
Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 6:21 pmPosted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 6:50 pmPosted: Mon Jun 18, 2007 7:05 pm
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