A Miscellany

I've lost count of how many carloads of books I've transported from my old farm to the new, grandly-named 'business centre', but I've reached a point where enough is enough. The rest of my books are going in the bin. They've been on sale for nearly two years without attracting a single customer, so my conscience is clear.

As Channing says in Spearhead From Space: "Destroy. Total Destruction. "

During the last few long, dusty days of throwing unwanted books in bins, I've come across a few gems. Here are my favourites:

As the advertising slogan used to say, "You can be sure of Shell".

This is from the good old days when having your five a day probably wasn't such a good idea, unless you thoroughly washed the carcinogenic residue off. Thanks to people like Rachel Carson, DDT was eventually banned from agricultural use, although the UK doggedly persisted until the mid-80s.

The last time I saw the acronym DDT, it was on a bottle of headlice shampoo. I didn't buy it.

This is from a 1940s boys' annual and features a novel solution to the problem of not being able to wear a tie in space.

If the British Empire had endured, perhaps this is how we would have conquered space, once we'd solved the problem of how to make a decent pot of tea in zero gravity.

There isn't much to be said about this leaflet. I just rather like the early 1950s graphic style. Apparently Nordkapp is Norwegian for Northern Cape.

I have no idea who this woman is, but spookily she looks just like a friend who has just died. I'd guess that this was taken in the late 70s or early 80s.

The photo fell out of a novel, where it was marking a page.

I can't really say why I like this illustration, but I think the combination of of the twilit sky and the lamplight in the foreground reminds me of a magical 'Night and Day' display that used to be exhibited in the Science Museum, many years ago.

I don't know why they got rid of it. They kept the Shipping gallery, which was very dull and didn't have any buttons to push.

These two images are from a late-1930s guide to photography. Both pictures evoke something of Britain between the wars - an era whose dying embers lasted until the late 1960s (and in the case of my wife's grandparents, the 1990s).

The first reminds me of a parade of shops on the border between Kew and Richmond, one of which was a delicatessen that my parents conspicuously avoided, probably because it sold 'funny' foreign food.

The second photo has an appealling wintry, Sunday afternoon atmosphere, unusually relaxed compared to most family group shots of the time.

The photography book also contained this loose insert:

The general message seems to be: feel free to snap away, but not if you're an enemy alien. I'm not sure if this notice alone would be a sufficient deterent to any foreign types, keen on assisting the Third Reich.

On the subject of the Fatherland, I opened a 1912 textbook for German schoolchildren learning English and discovered this gently-amusing anecdote:

'James II., when Duke of York once paid a visit to Milton. In the course of conversation he told the blind poet that the loss of his sight might be a punishment laid on him for having written against the late King.

"If, " replied Milton, "the calamities of this world are indications of Heaven's wrath, how guilty must your late Highness's father have been! I lost only my eyes: he lost his head."'

Finally (and apologies to anyone who has already seen this on Twitter), here is a great British brand-name that we don't hear very much of these days. I wonder what happened to them?