The Wonder Book of Soldiers

The Wonder Book of Soldiers for Boys and Girls

Edited by Harry Golding, Eighth Edition, Revised, Ward, Lock & Co., London and Melbourne. Undated; the 1930s.

A Life Guard sits his black horse under a stone arch on the cover, plume and breastplate and scarlet, and the book inside is about the army as a child of the interwar years would have seen it: the Trooping of the Colour, the regiments and their colours, the cavalry, the gunners, the men who built bridges and the men who flew. Twelve colour plates and over three hundred illustrations, with a frontispiece of a field gun in action on a hillside.

It is a book from between two wars, and it reads that way now. The uniforms are splendid, the ceremony is explained with real care, and there is a seriousness underneath it that the pictures do not quite hide. Harry Golding revised the Wonder Books continually and this eighth edition carries the changes of the years, which makes it a small document of its moment as well as a very handsome thing.

This copy is worn in the way these books nearly always are: the pictorial boards are rubbed, the corners bumped, the red border scuffed and the spine cloth faded. The pages are sound, the plates are bright and the title page is clean. As with all genuine antiquarian books, previous owners may have left their names or marks, and we see these as part of the book's long life rather than against it.

For anyone who has stood at the railings on Horse Guards and waited for the clock to strike.

Please note:

Each antiquarian book in the Ada & Vera Cabinet of Curiosities is unique. Condition will vary, and no two copies tell quite the same story.

Delivery

Books travel further than cheese. Delivered to your London hotel or any UK address (£9, free over £100), or sent tracked to the United States (£18, five to ten days). Printed books enter the US duty-free; the parcel carries a customs declaration and one copy is all there is.

Fifty pence from this book goes to the cats of London. Buttons insisted.