How does a person begin collecting books?  This is a question posed by Bromer Booksellers in their current catalogue All Our Yesterdays.  Often it will be something from our childhood: a memory from a bygone era.  The catalogue contains many books that almost everybody will have either read or, at the very least have handled.

Hans Christian Anderson must be one of those authors that everybody has heard about.  The Fir Tree is advertised in the catalogue at $350.  The book is inscribed by the illustrator, Nancy Ekholm Burkert on the half-title page.  She first gained recognition for her illustrations for Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach.  The Fir Tree contains six full-colour page illustrations and numerous black-and-white.

The Arabian Nights, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights is one of 100 copies signed by the illustrator, E. J. Detmold.  The book, priced at $3,250, contains twelve tipped-in full-colour plates with captioned tissue guards.  From a young age Detmold showed great promise particularly with his painting of animals and these feature in his fantasy drawings in The Arabian Nights.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains 173 illustrations by E. W. Kemble and a photogravure frontispiece portrait bust by Karl Gerhardt.  Huckleberry Finn is considered by many to be Twain’s greatest novel and one of the most important works of American literature.  T. S. Eliot wrote: “We come to see Huck as one of the permanent symbolic features of fiction,” and Hemingway once said that “all modern American literature comes from book by Mark Twain.”  This particular volume published in New York by Charles I. Webster and Company in 1885 is valued at $35,000.

Slightly cheaper at $1,850 is A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner.  This book, published by Methuen in 1928, is the final instalment of the Christopher Robin books and introduces the character, Tigger, to the residents of Hundred Acre Wood.  Although the characters are beloved by children the world over it was not Milne’s intention for the stories about Pooh to be for children.  Instead they were meant to entertain the child within us all.  Milne was a noted playwright who made a point to write whatever he pleased, never wanting to be tied down by his success.

The first English edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha published by W. Kent and Co., in 1860 is available for the sum of $28,500.  It contains twenty-four wood engravings after designs by George H. Thomas.  This copy features a jewelled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.  Each corner is adorned with an agate surrounded by four small garnets against a pointillé background.  Other stones are used in this elaborate binding, including sapphires.  The work is housed in a silk-lined solander case.