The Standing Catalogue
15 volumes presently on the shelves, each described honestly and priced accordingly.
- Natural History
A Bestiary of the Thames
Dredged testimony from watermen and mudlarks, set in a type that was retired the following year. The final entry is unfinished.
Rebacked antique calf, early ownership inscription$450.00 - Occult & Esoterica
A Grammar of Forgetting
Conjugations for verbs describing things that have stopped happening. The plates are printed in a sympathetic ink that fades on reading.
Vellum spine, boards rubbed, plates faded as issued$199.00 - Natural History
A Herbal of Doubtful Cures
Ninety botanical woodcuts, of which eleven depict plants no herbarium has since produced. The index lists ailments alphabetically by regret.
Full sheep, raised bands, hinges sound$164.00 - Occult & Esoterica
An Almanac of Small Hours
Divinations for the quarter-hour between three and four in the morning, when the house settles and the clocks disagree with one another.
Original cloth, gilt vignette, spine sunned$92.50 - Voyages & Cartography
Atlas of Provisional Coasts
Forty-one engraved plates of shorelines recorded in fog. Each is annotated in a second hand with the phrase 'confirm on return'.
Folio, publisher's buckram, plates crisp$340.00 - Detective Fiction
Inspector Vole Retires
The great detective takes up beekeeping and solves nothing for two hundred pages, to the documented fury of his subscribers.
Cheap edition, reading copy, hinge tender$59.00 - Poetry & Letters
Letters from the Lighthouse at Cray
Correspondence with a brother who may not have existed. The replies are transcribed in the same ink, which the editor declines to discuss.
Printed wrappers, edges untrimmed$78.00 - Natural History
Moths of the Lower Marsh
A field survey conducted entirely by lamplight over eleven summers, with tipped-in specimens rendered in gouache by the author's daughter.
Original green cloth, gilt moth to upper board$126.00 - Poetry & Letters
Nocturne for a Vacant House
Forty-four poems on empty rooms, arranged by the direction the light enters. Printed on paper made from the poet's own correspondence.
Handpress, one of 200, uncut$89.00 - Voyages & Cartography
North by Dead Reckoning
An account of eleven weeks without instruments, kept in a hand that gradually abandons punctuation and then abandons the calendar.
Original boards, later cloth slipcase$177.00 - Voyages & Cartography
Salt & Longitude
Thirty years before the mast, rendered in a hand that grows steadier as the weather worsens. The appendix charts nine islands since disputed.
Contemporary half morocco, foldout chart intact$215.00 - Detective Fiction
Seventeen Locked Rooms
Seventeen impossible crimes and seventeen solutions, published separately so that no reader might hold both at once. Both parts present.
Two volumes, matching jackets, near fine$112.00 - Detective Fiction
The Case of the Wednesday Lodger
A boarding-house mystery in which the culprit is established by page nine and the remaining chapters concern the rent.
First edition, dust jacket price-clipped$64.00 - Poetry & Letters
The Commonplace Book of Mrs. Ash
Recipes, remedies, and grievances in a single hand across sixty years, with pressed flowers marking the years she wrote nothing at all.
Manuscript, half roan, contents complete$265.00 - Occult & Esoterica
The Hermetic Cabinet
A locksmith's guide to doors that were never built. Includes seven folding plates of impossible keys and a chapter on the etiquette of thresholds.
Quarter calf, marbled boards, light foxing$148.00