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Books As Christmas Presents – Books Under £20

Books As Christmas Presents – Books Under £20

If you are on a budget and don’t have huge funds to spend on books, there are over 900 beautiful books for less than £20 on my website.

Click Here To View Over 900 Books under £20

£6.99
Acting and Stagecraft Made Simple Bowskill 1973 Click To View

Scottish Songs Findlater Campbell Lomond Books 2003
Click To View

Scottish Songs Findlater Campbell Lomond Books 2003 – A collection of more than 80 traditional compositions arranged for voice and piano. Click To View

£8.99

London Ward Lock Illustrated Guide 2008 – Originally published in the early 1950’s, all information is from a pre-1960’s edition. Click To View

Little Men Louisa M Alcott Collins Classics 1960 – The third book in the Little Women series. Click To View

£9.99

Churchill The Man of the Century Neil Ferrier 1955 – A pictorial biography detailing his life and career. Click To View

E=mc2 Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation Bodanis 2000 – In this fascinating ‘biography’ David Bodanis tells the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. Click To View

A Dictionary of British History Secker & Warburg 1981 – The book covers the history of the British Isles and its overseas possessions from the Roman conquest until 1970. Click To View

My Lively Lady Alec Rose Nautical Publishing 1968 – Alec Rose`s own story which includes two heroines, his boat `Lively Lady`, and Dorothy his wife. Click To View

Arms of the County Councils of Scotland David Patton Argyll 1977 – Full page colour plates of Council arms, with heraldic explanations. Click To View

£10.99

Edward Lear’s Nonsense Omnibus Warne c1966 – With all the original pictures, verses and stories. Click To View

A Social History Of Nineteenth-Century France Price Holme Meier 1987 – This book argues that the social impact of the French Revolution has been greatly exaggerated, and that in 1815 France was still predominantly a rural and pre-industrial society. Click To View

Tropic of Capricorn Henry Miller Guild 1988 – A riotous and explosive mixture of joys and frustrations, Tropic of Capricorn chronicles Miller’s early life in New York, from his repressive Brooklyn childhood spent amongst ‘a galaxy of screwballs’ to frantic, hilarious years of dead-end jobs and innumerable erotic adventures. Click To View

£11.99

A World Too Vast Columbus Alexander McKee 1990
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A World Too Vast Columbus Alexander McKee 1990 – The Four Voyages of Columbus. Illustrated with colour photographs, contemporary woodcuts, engravings and maps. Click To View

A Speech On The Death Of King George The Fifth 1936 – Broadcast from London by the Prime Minister on Tuesday 21st 1936 Click To View

Villette Charlotte Bronte Everymans 1992 – Charlotte Bronte’s most autobiographical novel. Click To View

£12.99

Napoleon His Wives and Women Christopher Hibbert HarperCollins 2002 – Entertaining biography of Napoleon Bonaparte – looking at his relationships with his wives, mistresses and women. Click To View

The Secret History Procopius Folio Society 1990 – The Secret History covers roughly the same years as the first seven books of the History of Justinian’s Wars and appears to have been written after they were published. Click To View

Monkeys In The Dark Blanche dAlpuget Aurora 1980 – Novel based in troubled Indonesia. Click To View

Sermons and Soda-Water John O’Hara Cresset 1961 – These sermons admirably fulfil their author’s intention, which is to record the way people talked and felt during the troubled interim from the end of one world war to the end of another. Click To View

Muddied Oafs The Last Days of Rugger Richard Beard Yellow Jersey 2003 – There is Rugby Union: the fast, compelling, TV-friendly combat sport in which sponsored gladiators are sold on their ability to crash into each other at top speed, and sometimes even to avoid each other and score. And then there’s Rugger! Click To View

£14.99

Alexander Solzhenitsyn A Century In His Life Thomas Little Brown 1998 – This is as much a disturbing, haunting history of the twentieth century as it is a biography of a great novelist. Click To View

My Work at the Surete Jean Belin Harrap 1950 – From police constable to Commissioner, including much on his battles with the Gestapo in WW2 & with the fascist Cagoulards & Petainists. Click To View

Atlas of Medieval Europe Routledge 1998 – The book’s maps covers the period from the fall of the Roman Empire through to the beginning of the Renaissance. Click To View

Arthurian Legends Coghlan Claremont Books 1996 – In this book Ronan Coghlan has examined all the different strands of the Arthurian myth, bringing together material from a wide range of sources such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Malory, Chrétien de Troyes, the Mabinogion and the English Gawain Cycles. Click To View

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Anita Loos Folio Society 1990 – The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady is a comic novel written by Anita Loos. Click To View

Point Counter Point Aldous Huxley Folio Society 1958 – Huxley characterizes the symptoms of “the disease of modern man” in the manner of a composer — themes and characters are repeated, altered slightly, and played off one another in a tone that is at once critical and sympathetic. Click To View

£15.99

Secret Societies David V Barrett Godsfield Press 2008 – The book explores the covert societies that have exerted power and influence over millions of people throughout history. Click To View

A Summer In Lochaber Catriona Fforde 2002 – The history of the first of the Jacobite Risings – not the 1715 rebellion but that of the summer of 1689. Click To View

Complete Illustrated Works Shakespeare Bath Press 1988 – The illustrations in this volume are taken from various classic editions of the plays and from paintings on Shakespearean themes. Click To View

The Venus of Konpara John Masters Michael Joseph 1960 – A moving and exciting tale of six people in search of an ancient Indian statue and the tumultuous effect the search has on their lives. Click To View

£16.99

Cheri Colette Folio Society 1963 – Set in the ‘demi-monde’ of the Parisian courtesans before World War One, it tells the story of Lea an aging courtesan who has for a number of years been teaching Frederic Pelous (Cheri) a handsome, spoilt, sardonic young man about love. Click To View

£17.99

The Toynbee Convector Ray Bradbury Grafton 1989 – An old woman learns what it truly means to believe in ghosts in ”On the Orient, North”; another woman discovers a mysterious ”Trapdoor” in a house she has occupied for years; and an old man attempts to change his own past in ”A Touch of Petulance” in this new collection of 23 stories by one of sf’s grand masters. Click To View

£19.99

The Norse Atlantic Saga Gwyn Jones Oxford 1965 – Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and America documented by Professor Gwyn Jones. Click To View

Aylmer Court Henly Arden Wells Gardner Darton 1894
Click To View

Aylmer Court Henly Arden Wells Gardner Darton 1894 – A novel set in the time of Cromwell. Click To View

Voyages to the Moon and the Sun Cyrano de Bergerac Folio Society 1991 – Originally published in 1657 and 1662, respectively, the novels combined science fiction and political satire. Click To View

Find Over 900 Books under £20

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Books As Christmas Presents – The Superb Heron Books Collections

Books As Christmas Presents – The Superb Heron Books Collections

Heron Books / Edito-Service were responsible throughout the 1960s, 70s and early 80s for publishing ‘Collectors Editions’ of famous authors (illustrated, with introductions, decorated leatherette covers, silk bookmark, rarely dated, with some leather Special Editions). The books were sold directly through newspaper advertisements on a monthly, something like a book club, basis. The books were sold on a Free Approval basis with never any commitment to buy either the volume sent or any further volumes. Heron Books were phenomenally successful in their time and claimed that they sold approaching 100 million volumes world wide.

As well as substantial Author Specific collections they also produced a variety of sets such as; Masters of Espionage, a terrific collection of 20 top spy novels; Books That Changed Man’s Thinking, a 29 volume collection of some of the most significant and powerful books ever written; Poets Of The English Language, a 5 volume anthology spanning 600 years; Women Who Made History, a 20 volume collection of women of note; and Men of Destiny, no details for this collection as yet.

And lets not forget the superb 39 Volume Agatha Christie Thriller Collection.

Currently Selling – Several Complete Agatha Christie collections, Joseph Conrad, Hammond Innes, Alistair Maclean, Somerset Maugham, J B Priestley, D H Lawrence, Nevil Shute, Colette, Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, Wilbur Smith, John Steinbeck, Daphne Du Maurier, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc.

Gift Suggestion – Why not put your own collection together? If you are interested in more than one book as a gift then please email me with your selections and I will confirm availability and give you a Special Price

Browse More at Heron Books

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Dennis Wheatley

Dennis Wheatley

Dennis Wheatley

Dennis Yates Wheatley (1897-1977) was born in Brixton, south London, the son of a wine merchant. His best-known books were occult and supernatural thrillers, starting with The Devil Rides Out (1934); but from the beginning there were science fiction elements there too. Black August (1934) is about a future war, after which Britain is rescued from collapse by a palace coup. His large output includes other science fiction novels, such as They Found Atlantis (1936) (they found Atlantis), Sixty Days to Live (1939) (about the arrival of a destructive comet), and Star of Ill-Omen (1952) (which features flying saucers). A library of witchcraft and adventure. Dennis Wheatley, storyteller supreme, made a lifelong study of the occult. His meticulous research into the black arts reveals almost unbelievable sorcery. He warned. ‘By participating in Satanic Rites, however sham, one can make oneself a focus for Evil.’ No writer cared more about authenticity. This is true not only of his Satanist books, but also of his many other novels.

Browse Now at Works of Dennis Wheatley

Wheatley was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant into the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War. Dennis was gassed in a chlorine attack during Passchendaele and was invalided out, having served in Flanders, on the Ypres Salient, and in France at Cambrai and Saint-Quentin. In 1919 he took over management of the family’s wine business. In 1931, however, after his father’s death, and with business having declined because of the Great Depression, he was financially over-extended, faced near bankruptcy, and was forced to sell his wine business. Knowing his love of telling tales, his wife suggested he write a book. DW wrote a detective novel called ‘Three Inquisitive People’ which introduced the Duke de Richleau and his friends and it was accepted for publication by Hutchinson, who were to be his publishers for the rest of his life. Before the book could be published he wrote a second book, an adventure story set in Russia and featuring the same set of heroes – ‘The Forbidden Territory’. Hutchinson decided this was a better novel and should be published first. He followed this with an ‘out of series’ novel which he wrote in a fortnight, and then went back to the writing of impeccably researched novels with ‘Black August’, which featured his second principal hero Gregory Sallust, and ‘The Fabulous Valley’. In 1934 he wrote an occult novel, ‘The Devil Rides Out’. Frequently rated as the best occult novel of the twentieth century, and it is his most famous work.

During the Second World War Wheatley was a member of the London Controlling Section, which secretly coordinated strategic military deception and cover plans. His literary talents led to his working with planning staffs for the War Office. He wrote numerous papers for them, including suggestions for dealing with a possible Nazi invasion of Britain (recounted in his works Stranger than Fiction and The Deception Planners). The most famous of his submissions to the Joint Planning Staff of the war cabinet was on “Total War”. He took part in the plans for the Normandy invasions.

After the War, Wheatley bought a mini country mansion in seaside Lymington in Hampshire, and he continued to write books, introducing a third principal character, Roger Brook, whose exploits took place in the Napoleonic era. He worked hard and to a well-disciplined routine. For around eight months of the year DW would devote himself to his writings. He would rise mid-morning and sometimes go to bed well after midnight, depending on how his writing was going. He took the remaining months off to go travelling, partly for pleasure and partly to research his next books. In the days when international travel was a distinct privilege, he went round the world twice, and used countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, Mexico and Egypt as backdrops for his books. During this time several of his books were filmed by Hammer, the most famous being ‘The Devil Rides Out’ with his friend Sir Christopher Lee playing the role of the Duke, a role which he enjoyed enormously.

Dennis Wheatley wrote sixty five books in all, with fifty six being novels and the remainder non-fiction. Eleven featured the Duke de Richleau, eleven Gregory Sallust, and twelve involved Roger Brook. Some nine of these are considered ‘Black Magic’ novels – a genre for which he is particularly famous.

By the nineteen sixties, Wheatley was selling over a million copies of his novels a year; his work was sold in around twenty nine countries and translated into over twenty eight languages, and altogether he is estimated to have sold something like fifty million copies of his books in his lifetime.

Dennis Wheatley Very Good Collection Heron Books Complete 52 Volumes c1972
52 Volume Dennis Wheatley

He wrote with great intensity and created an amazing variety of characters and situations. The 52 volume Heron Edition of Wheatley’s novels, which includes his espionage and adventure stories, as well as the occult, is the only finely-bound edition in the world.
The craftsmanship is of the highest standard. Scarlet Kidron and lavish golden and black embellishing have been used to startling effect. The illustrations were specially commissioned from English artists.

Gift Suggestion – Why not put your own collection together? If you are interested in more than one book as a gift then please email me with your selections and I will confirm availability and give you a Special Price

Browse Now at Works of Dennis Wheatley

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Books As Christmas Presents – Limited Edition Folio Society Books

Books As Christmas Presents – Limited Edition Folio Society Books

Metamorphoses – Ovid

All titles chosen to become Folio books are the finest in their genre and all are treated to extremely high production standards, but those selected for their Limited Editions Collections are, quite simply, exceptional. Great works of literature or history become great works of art.

For Limited Editions their production teams have leave to indulge their passion for exquisite materials and fine binding techniques which simply cannot be considered for longer book runs. Exceptional craftsmanship creates these highly collectable books – from and content perfectly married to produce a lasting legacy for generations to come.

During the 1930s, artist sculptor and typographer Eric Gill collaborated with the Golden Cockerel Press on a number of projects. The Folio Society has published in facsimile the three crowning works of this association: Troilus and Creseyde, The Canterbury Tales and The Four Gospels. They are among the most admired books of the 20th century, a sublime marriage of type and illustration.

My favourite Limited Editions include Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; and Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Browse Our Folio Society Limited Editions

 

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Books As Christmas Presents – The Beauty of Folio Society Books

Books As Christmas Presents – The Beauty of Folio Society Books

These titles and many more beautiful Folio Society books for Christmas are currently available at Folio Society Books

‘Would you like a book for Christmas?’ one of P. G. Wodehouse’s plump, tilt-nosed, sporty heroines asks her boyfriend from the Drones Club, to which he replies: ‘No thanks, I’ve got a book.’ A life with one book is unthinkable, and while Folio Society books are not the only ones, nor should they be, they will, with luck, have a role to play in enriching the lives of book-lovers for years to come.

Folio Society books come in many different formats, whether it’s an early individual book with a dust jacket or one of the later ones in slipcases

Candide with Dust Jacket

The Folio Society has also published numerous superb Boxed Sets, here’s the superb Swallows and Amazons collection published for Jonathan Cape

Swallows and Amazons

And some of the finest Author Collections

Anthony Trollope Collection 48 Volumes Series Bound Folio Society 1981-99
Complete Anthony Trollope

Folio Society books are set above the rest in almost every aspect – exceptional typography, illustration, paper, printing, and binding.

These titles and many more beautiful Folio Society books for Christmas are currently available at Folio Society Books

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Featured Books of the Month May 2024

Books of the Month April 2024

 

His Dark Materials Trilogy

The first books on this month’s list is a box set of His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights (1995; published as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). Many will have seen the television series produced by HBO/BBC which was broadcast between November 2019 and February 2023.

The story follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The children’s adventures take them across time where they meet witches and armoured bears, fallen angels and soul-eating spectres that destroy the souls of adults to which children are immune, rendering the world empty of adults. The children travel to the land of the dead and in the end, the fate of both the living—and the dead—will rely on them.

This uniformly bound set by the folio society with illustrations by Peter Bailey would make a beautiful addition to any collection.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed “the Astronomer-Poet of Persia”.

This first version of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the best-loved poems in the English language. With its exotic themes and its blend of melancholy and romance, it has seduced readers and inspired artists for many years.

Over the years the Folio Society have produced a number of versions of the poetry, we currently have 3 versions of the book ranging from 1973 – 2012 demonstrating how this book has stood the test of time and still remains ever popular today.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

The Quiet American by Graham Greene set during the First Indochina War, The Quiet American is narrated by the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, who meets the young idealistic American agent Alden Pyle. The novel’s larger conflict is cantered on the French and American invasion of Vietnam, which is echoed microcosmically in the conflict that arises between Fowler and Pyle when they both fall in love with the same Vietnamese woman, Phuong.

The novel has received much attention due to its prediction of the outcome of the Vietnam War and subsequent American foreign policy since the 1950s. Greene portrays Pyle as so blinded by American exceptionalism that he cannot see the calamities he brings upon the Vietnamese.

The book uses Greene’s experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French Indochina 1951–1954. He was apparently inspired to write The Quiet American during October 1951 while driving back to Saigon from Ben Tre province, accompanied by an American aid worker who lectured him about finding a “third force in Vietnam”

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Featured Books of the Month April 2024

Books of the Month April 2024

I am Legend Richard Matheson

The first book on this month’s list is a beautiful limited edition version of Richard Matheson’s book I am Legend. This book was first published in 1954 and is a post-apocalyptic horror novel. Many of you will have seen its recent cinematic adaptation starring Will Smith however did you realise that the zombies roaming the streets at night are vampires?

The story concerns Robert Neville possibly the last surviving man on earth as he struggles to survive in a world where after a pandemic destroyed the human race turning the remaining survivors into vampires. The story tracks his survival as he battles his own daemons while roaming the streets in the day looking for supplies and answers to the pandemic. At night he locks himself away and prays for dawn when the streets are again free from the swarms of blood thirsty vampires.

This copy comes with signed limited edition artwork by Dave McKean, the book is leather bound, individually numbered and comes in its own unique slipcase. This is truly a wonderful version of this chilling story of survival against all the odds.

The Midnight Folk John Masefield

The Second book we have to share is The Midnight Folk by John Mansfield. This book is a fantasy story about a young boys quest to discover a treasure that stolen from his family.

Young Kay Harker is visited by great grandfather Aston Tirrold Harker who one night steps out of his portrait to tell him about the treasure. He is told the treasure is also saught by a covenant of witches, one of which is his governess Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.

Can Kay Harker find the treasure before the witches? Along the way he is helped by the midnight folk: creatures like Nibbins the cat and Rollicum Bitem Lightfoot the fox, and even his lost toys, who will join him on his dangerous quest.

This fantastic story has all of the ingredience to ignite the imagination of its reader, it includes pirates, witches, lost treasure and talking animals. Although written in 1927 the book has all of the ingredience of a modern Disney story and perfectly captures a child’s perspective, yet there is also plenty of humour that adults will appreciate too.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

In this astonishing collection, first published in 1979, familiar stories become seductive, enchanting and terrifying. In this collection the author Angela Carter deals with issues of feminism and although each particular narrative deals with a different set of characters, the ‘oppressed female seeking liberation’ is a common theme and concept that is explored throughout the collection

In the title story, Bluebeard is a sado-masochist who lures his inexperienced bride to his castle on the coast of Brittany – but is defeated by a most unexpected adversary. Subversive twists abound: in ‘The Werewolf’, a retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, a girl hacks off a wolf’s paw, only to find it turning into a warty, withered old hand that she recognises as her grandmother’s. Carter’s women are more likely to outwit their attackers than fall prey to them – as the heroine of ‘The Company of Wolves’ puts it, ‘she knew she was nobody’s meat’.

In this particular book the artist Igor Karash won the second House of Illustration/Folio Society Illustration Award for his work.

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Folio Society Books Wanted

Folio Society Books Wanted

Top Prices Paid

 

I have customers currently waiting for the following;

  • Winston Chruchill, The World Crisis, The Folio Society,
  • The Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser, Folio Society Limited Edition 2011
  • Heron Books Complete Agatha Christie Collection 39 volumes

If you have any of these that you want to sell or indeed any Folio Society collections or Heron Books collection then please contact me on;

email: sales@hcbooksonline.com

Phone: 0113 273 2025

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Heron Books Collections

Heron Books Collections

Thomas Hardy

Edito-Service / Heron Books were responsible throughout the 60s, 70s and early 80s for publishing ‘Collectors Editions’ of famous authors, including Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Alistair MacLean, Wilbur Smith, Dennis Wheatley and many many others. These books were mainly sold by Mail Order and were advertised mainly in the Sunday Newspaper Supplements.
Browse full lists of these collections at Heron Books Index

Dennis Wheatley Very Good Collection Heron Books Complete 52 Volumes c1972
52 Volume Dennis Wheatley

Browse Heron Books For Sale
If you have a Set or Part Set For Sale, why not email me at; sales@hcbooksonline.com