PENGUIN No 348, Biggles Flies Again, is the one to look for. “It was published in 1941 with a small print run, so it’s generally worth ten or 20 times the average early Penguin,” Jon Edgson, of Books for Collectors in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, says.
“At a book fair in Sussex two or three years ago, word went round the room that one of the dealers had a copy. There was a spontaneous auction. It changed hands for £500. As a collector myself, I think that’s crazy, but as a dealer I think it’s wonderful.”
Edgson works from home, but welcomes visitors by appointment to his bookroom, stacked with vintage orange-backed Penguins perhaps better known to collectors than to readers: A Child of the Jago, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, Barlasch of the Guard.
Other shelves reflect his own enthusiasms, which include Cecil Beaton and Vogue, and are a testament to his career as an interior designer. “I used to do house conversions,” he says. “But in the early Nineties. TV programmes started telling people they could do it all themselves for practically nothing, so I moved into books.”
As a collector, he knew what to expect from customers: “True collectors have got to be obsessives; they’ll almost twitch when they see a book they want, and when you show them something they don’t know about, it’s like revealing the Holy Grail.”
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Edgson meets them at his Cirencester market stall every Friday and at book fairs (he manages the biannual fairs in Cirencester). “Really specialised collectors will ring you up if you’ve advertised a book and say: ‘Can you turn to page 212? On line 3, is there a cedilla under the ‘c’ or not? That’s crucial.’ You respect it, but sometimes with a bit of a grimace.”
Contact: The Garden House, Stonewalls, Victoria Road, Cirencester; 01285 652319.
Specialises in: early Penguins, fashion, design, photography.
Prize exhibit: 18 bound volumes of Vogue from the 1930s and 1940s, “the sort of things you don’t really want to sell unless you have to”. But if he has to the price is £2,000.
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Hard to shift: “A large collection of books about radio and television in the Forties and Fifties; plenty of stuff about valves.”
Best customer story: “A woman asked me to find a copy of a book about flying, written by her father. When I found one, it had an envelope in it, addressed to him that had been posted, delivered and opened. We never worked that out.”
STEPHEN McCLARENCE