UK 1st edition.

                                  All books shown in the various sections are copies from my own collection. I have been reading for 75 years and buying and collecting for 65. Like all collections it didn't start as a project but was simply a passion; but also, like all real collections, patterns began to emerge.

The extent of my reading and interests is varied and fits no discernable theme or topic, but simply reflects whatever has pricked my magpie eye at anytime in my life. Although random, the often casual interest has led me down pathways that have revealed shapes and meanings  far removed from the initial passing interest. It has led to fascinating discoveries as half formed feelings and interests have begun to aquire a shape and meaning that was not my original intention. 

Among my 1000s of books I have found that they can be broken down into discrete elements and themes that lead me on to further discoveries that never end. All is connected, all is part of the limitless main, and collectors try to provide stepping stones through this vast landscape to make sense of what seem to be wholly disparate fragments of the unknown whole.

The text is the key and no real collector ever loses sight of that, but we spice the substance with the style and so move into the realm that transcends the academic, the rational  and the intellectual, and marry the two instincts of knowledge and beauty into an artifact that enhances and transcends both.

The sections that follow only give an indication of my collection, and are offered simply as an example of  the byways that I have explored, and am able to show in an acceptable form. There is much that I can never hope to own and so I simply enjoy the substance; but there is much  that I can show and give some idea of how to develope our passions into a visible form.

Much of what I can show is rare and valuable, but much is not, and simply demonstrates how imagination can assemble a collection, however small, into a visible representation of something  more than the sum of its parts.

There is no deliberate pattern to anything that follows, simply presented as the whim takes me; perhaps if I do it long enough a meaning will emerge.