Antiquities & Oddities

//Antiquities & Oddities
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  • An annual for the little ones with stories, puzzles, pictures to colour in, poetry and games. With contributions by Enid Blyton, Hazel Brown, Clare Westcott, Gordon  Hewitt and more. Colour plates and monochrome cartoon pages in blue and orange. No puzzles have been completed or any pictures coloured in; no marks of previous ownership.
  • The second book in the Little Women series - in an edition published under the original name. Meg marries her John Brooke, despite dire threats of disinheritance from Aunt March; Jo tries her wings, hopping from the family nest to New York to see if she really  has the talent to write; Amy is invited to tour Europe with Aunt March and Beth is slowly recuperating from scarlet fever. New experiences come to the girls: Meg is tempted beyond her proud husband's means, and must learn some valuable life lessons; Jo escapes Laurie's courtship, falls into the trap of writing sensation stories, knowing that her family would not approve and meets the best friend she will ever have; Amy gets some bewildering lessons in love and Beth has a secret - and not even her family know what that secret is.
  • Over a hundred enigmas to solve, as well as logic puzzles, magic squares, brain teasers, riddles and more all with a medieval theme to wake up and perk up the grey matter. Can you foil the cunning traps in these tricky games? There's no sturdy steed or magic sword to help - alas! - but a cunning mind and a little reflection will conquer the dragons and dodge the poison vials.
  • Young Bill Berenger, having already won a considerable reputation for pulling off some difficult assignments involving detective skill, pluck and other assets, is this time involved in the machinations of a half-mad individual who calls himself the Fire-Seraph. This dangerous sort believes himself the descendant of the Incas and plots to dominate the world. Thus Berenger finds himself - to begin with - responsible for a cargo of explosives which the Fire-Seraph is hoping to secure for his own purpose. One thing leads to another and even when, after an air attack, Berenger's ship reaches its South American port and the end of the adventure might appear to have been reached, its most desperate episodes are ahead. Bill again meets his girl-friend Janet-Eve, and clearly a romance is blooming but before it can come to full flower, he has to take the biggest risk he ever ran in a situation that seems hopeless.  Historic naval fiction and adventure for young adults.
  • The original Gothic romance potboiler of its day.  The cover shows veteran Australia actress Queenie Ashton in the role of Lady Isabel.  This edition published for the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of 1939 for McDowell's Department Store, Sydney and is the abridged adapted for radio edition. It also contains facsimile autographed photos of the cast.
  • A pictorial history of Australia by Charles Henry Kerry (1858-1928).  Kerry was a surveyor but changed to photography in 1875 and by using dry plate photography (a new process then)  he was able to delay processing his negatives. Until dry plate photography, negatives had to be processed immediately. This new method gave Kerry more time to do more scenic views. This volume is a revisit to many of Kerry's locations - tourist attractions, farms, events and occupations such as cattle farming and tree felling showing how much has changed and how much has NOT changed.  A fabulous collection of black and white and colour archival photographs with interviews and articles.
  • First published in 1952, it's obvious that even then there was a growing concern for the amount of road deaths.  This book sets out clearly and comprehensively the chief causes of road accidents: speed, DUI, failure to observe rules, faults and many others - and gives sound advice on how to avoid them.  Also included are sections on parking, heavy vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians. Nothing much has changed since this book's publication in 1952. The only thing needed to bring this book up to date is a section on switching off mobile phones while driving!
  • Seven more rounds of sparring, as Fletch and his fellow cons of Slade nick continue their struggle against the authority of Messrws MacKay and Barrowclough.  Cover features the late great Ronnie Barker as Fletch.
  • A Grumpy perspective on the daily grind. Whether we are celebrity chef or hapless waiter, engineer or oily rag, commissioning editor or TV producer, all of us have a whole daily wagon-load of s**t to deal with in the name of work. From boardroom to boredom, from 'what's the point?' to PowerPoint, from 9 to 5 to P45. And that's what this book from uber-grump Stuart Prebble is all about; the utter everyday relentless crapulence of working for 'the man', or indeed 'the woman'.   It's not possible in a book of this size to include ALL the grumps arising from the working day - the office politics, the shortcomings of IT, the interminable meetings and some of your colleagues' weirder habits, but he is giving it a go. Grumpy? I'll say we are. Illustrated by Noel Ford.
  • A treasure trove of childhood past with stories by Noel Streatfield, Sir Edmund Hillary, Michael Westmore and more. There's puzzles and quizzes, short stories and articles, pictures in colour and black and white.
  • The Good Life's Tom and Barbara Good make life merry hell for posh neighbours Margo and Jerry in this adaptation of the second series of  the iconic television series. Jerry and Margo cope with more of the Good's self-sufficient eccentricities in suburban Surbiton - pigs, college students determined to make Tom their guru, torn posh frocks -  while also dealing with Jerry's boss who thinks the Leadbetter home is an open house for entertaining clients.

  • In this volume: The Adventure of 'The Three Dead Smugglers', Rose Macaulay; The Strange Adventures of A Sun Umbrella, Kay Martin; Netball For Girls, Cicely M. Read; The Disappearance Of Daisy Cheyne, M.B. Sandford; A Treasure From The Snow, Elsie J. Oxenham; A Caravan Holiday, Bertha Leonard; Lawn Tennis Hints, W. Haines Jull; The Lucky Leaf, Florence Bone; The Toy Theatre, A. Waddingham Seers; Dragon House and Trial By Jury, Katharine L. Oldmeadow; A New Hobby, L.G. Fitzpatrick; Curio Collecting, Ethel Talbot; A Castle In Spain, Guy Stirling; The Princess Nuala, Katherine Tynan; Book Parties and The Tree Of Liberty, Violet M. Methley; A Handful Of Three, E.L. Haverfield; Touch-Ball, R.L.G. Goodchild; The Witch's Spell, E.E. Cowper; Hidden Treasure, Jessie Leckie Herbertson; Decoration In Water Colour, Grace Lodge Clifton-Shelton; Keeping A Nature Diary, A. Waddingham Seers; All The Veronicas and Experiments In Sweet Making, Alice Massie; Three Rainy Day Games For Juniors, Doris Wood; Hints To Amateur Actors, C. Bernard Rutley; A Visit From Bashio Bazouks, Kay Martin; Let's Have A Play, Katharine Oldmeadow; Twilight Speaks, Blanche Jones;   A Fool's Errand, Catherine A. Morin and Maud Morin; Athletics For Girls, Frank N. Punchard.
  • Being an Imagined Sequel to A Christmas Carol. Seven years after Scrooge was converted - to everyone's satisfaction - we see that Bob Cratchit has done well as the smug senior partner of Cratchit and Scrooge; Tiny Tim, cured of his ailment, is now a troublesome teenager; his sister Belinda, the remaining unmarried daughter of the household falls unsuitably in love; and Scrooge has given away most of his money, is crippled with gout and can't get upstairs, and so lives in the small cloakroom behind the Cratchit's front door. Cratchit, informed of his impending knighthood, tries to have Scrooge sent away - and now it's Bob who must learn a lesson in charity! Illustrated by Mark Summers.
  • The first edition of this book came out in 1928, and as a result of 'much correspondence' and further research, the author released this updated edition in 1944. Contents in this volume: The Devil's Hoofmarks: A series of strange footmarks in the snow appeared in Devonshire in 1855; The Vault At Barbados - also known as the moving coffins of Barbados; The Ships Seen On The Ice: Ships from a polar expedition believed lost in 1845 are spotted years later; The Berbalangs of Cagyan Sulu: Tales of zombies in the Philippines in 1896; Orffyreus' Wheel: Did  Orffyreus invent a perpetual motion machine in 1717? Crosse's Acari: A new species of insects allegedly created by the reanimation of dead matter; The Auroras And Other Doubtful Islands: Islands that had been recognised and charted for centuries - yet they don't exist...; Mersenne's Numbers: Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, gave his name to Mersenne primes in the 17th century - prime numbers that are one less than a power of two;  The Wizard of Mauritius: In the late 1700s Bottineau could predict, with accuracy, which ships would soon be arriving; The Planet Vulcan: Is there another planet between Mercury and the Sun? Nostradamus: The French scholar and mystic predicted a great many things that came true yet sceptics will point at those which haven't come true - to which the the believers retort, 'Yet...' Having written his quatrains in a mix of Latin, Greek, French with a touch of English tossed in. It being entirely possible that the quatrains were torn in half by Nostradamus so that the first two lines may have little to do with the last two, the world has not yet heard the last of him. While at least one of these 'Oddities' has now been solved - the moving coffins of Barbados - the others remain unexplained to this day. With photographs and sketches.
  • Jean Nicol, before she was twenty, worked as a journalist at the Daily Mirror, answering - as she put it - the cries of the lovelorn as agony aunt 'Dorothy Dix'. In 1939 she began work as a junior press officer at the Savoy Hotel and when war broke out, the senior staff departed and she unexpectedly found herself in charge. Her office began to take on a unique importance as it gradually became a meeting place for celebrities and American press representatives. She was so successful that after helping Daniel Sangster, film publicist for director David O. Selznick, with media releases, he made her an offer; leave the Savoy and take over the European office of the David Selznick Organisation. She declined - and she also received a rise in salary from Miles Thornwill, Chairman of the Savoy.  She met royalty, politicians, world leaders and many famous actors and actresses, including Danny Kaye, James Mason, Charlie Chaplin and Gertrude Lawrence. She first met Derek Tangye in 1941 when he asked her to stock his book, Time Was Mine in the hotel book stall. They became engaged in the winter of 1942 and married in February 1943. In 1949, they moved to Cornwall where they lived on a small holding with a variety of pets, growing daffodils and potatoes until Jean's death in 1986.  Drawing on her experience as an agony aunt and her shrewd observations, this book is about the  workings of the Savoy, its rich and famous guests and a wonderful view of social life in London over the war years and afterwards. This book was so popular that it was reprinted 18 times between 1952 and 1972. Illustrated with black and white photographs. 
  • The story of the dysfunctional and dirt-poor Walden family, headed by patriarch Ty Ty, who is firmly convinced that there is treasure buried on his land, treasure that dates back to the glory days of the clan.  He is determined to find it and drives his family to dig up the entire property in a frenzied effort to find it - all except that acre that's dedicated to God and must not be touched!  Made into a film with Robert Ryan and Tina Louise, well away from her ditzy Gilligan's Island role.
  • Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness and determination. She used those attributes to survive her husband's desertion in post-Depression America with two children and to claw her way out of poverty, becoming a successful businesswoman. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to her monstrous, selfish daughter... Made into a classic film noir starring Joan Crawford in 1945 and revisited as a miniseries in 2011 starring Kate Winslet.
  • When Jerusha Abbott, an eighteen-year-old girl living in an orphan asylum, was told that a mysterious millionaire had agreed to pay for her education, it was like a dream come true. For the first time in her life, she had someone she could pretend was "family." But everything was not perfect, for he chose to remain anonymous and asked that she only write him concerning her progress in school. Who was this mysterious gentleman and would Jerusha ever meet him?
  • Four men set out on camel-back to cross the starkly beautiful Red Centre.  Two of the men have mysterious pasts and their stories are woven into this novel that reveals dramatically the indigenous way of life. Illustrated by Mona Killpack.
  • A compilation by Esquire Magazine that features the literary leading lights. In this volume: With Other Eyes, Luigi Pirandello; Turnabout Is Fair, D.H. Lawrence; Fly Away Ladybird, Conrad Aiken; Reflexshuns On Iggerunce, Ezra Pound; Exit The Boob, e.e. cummings; Arnold Pentland, Thomas Wolfe; The Celebrity, John Dos Passos; The Godly Warrior, Thomas Mann; Three Acts Of Music, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Life In A Prison Cell, Maxim Gorki; Heavenly And Earthly Love, Ferenc Molnar; The Tithe Of The Lord, Theodore Dreiser; The Butterfly And The Tank, Ernest Hemingway; Dreiser At Spoon River, Edgar Lee Masters; The Captain Is A Card, Nelson Algren; An Evening On The House, H.L. Mencken; Gentlemen, This Is Revolution, Sinclair Lewis; This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise, J.D. Salinger; The Language Of Men, Norman Mailer; St. Francis Xavier's Bones, Evelyn Waugh; The Chinese Dog, Alberto Moravia; Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley; The Case Of Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck; The Question Of Ezra Pound, Richard H. Rovers; The  Misfits, Arthur Miller; Leaving The Yellow House, Saul Bellow; Letters To Alice Lockett, Bernard Shaw; Memoirs Of Mencken And Fitzgerald, George Jean Nathan.
  • Sir Marmaduke Vane-Temperly,  a man of the world who is weary of the world, goes forth to seek his vanished youth. He's cynical, pompous and ever the gentleman as befits his position. Of the many adventures that befall him, a mysterious murder is but one.  He also meets Eve-Anne,  a gentle, innocent 19 year old girl who on a quest for adventure and who knows him as 'John Hobbes', a gambler who cannot understand Eve-Anne's depth of generosity and feeling for those worse off than herself and her endless willingness to help them.  Set in the Regency, when bucks and dandies thought it quite the adventure to meet the bruisers, vagabonds and footpads that abounded in an England that had a sharp divide between the rich and poor, the privileged and the commoners.
  • The Granny on the Roof-rack...and other tales of modern horror. Over 100 contemporary Australian legends reproduced just as they spread via word-of-mouth, the media, social media and the Internet. The stories range from the funny, to the bizarre and definitely to the terrifying. Told with tongue in cheek and a large grain of salt, topics included in this volume: The Baby In The Microwave; An Elephant On The Mini; The Frozen Chook At The Checkout; Kid(ney) Napping; and of course, the infamous Granny On The Roofrack.
  • Hercule Poirot is vacationing on the Cornish coast when he meets Miss Buckley, the young and reckless mistress of End House, an imposing structure perched on the rocky cliffs of St. Loo. Poirot takes a particular interest in the young woman who has recently narrowly escaped a series of life-threatening accidents; he feels that these so-called accidents are more than just mere coincidences or a spate of bad luck. It seems all too clear to him that someone is trying to do away with Miss Buckley - but who? And why? In his quest for answers, Poirot must delve into the dark history of End House. The deeper he gets into his investigation, the more certain he is that the killer will soon strike again. And this time, the killer might succeed...
  • Adrienne was the beautiful beloved bride of Vincent, Lord Satan, eager to begin her new life as mistress of Castle Caudill. From the moment she enters Castle Caudill, Adrienne is drawn into a world of demonic terror. Does she participate in satanic rituals and black masses or are they only horrifying dreams? Is her husband a devil with great powers at his command? And why does the ghost of Lord Satan's mother mournfully roam the halls of the castle? Desperately Adrienne sought the fearful truth, through shadows that concealed nightmarish terrors, in a world that cloaked dark unseen forces she was powerless to control...Cover art by Enrich Torres-Prat. Roberts, daughter of an Ohio missionary, was a hardworking librarian by day, devil-romancer...most likely also by day. Somewhat maligned by later romance historians for her undeniably violent sex scenes, Roberts was something of a pioneer in her context and milieu  in bringing a hefty amount of explicitly disreputable sexuality to the gothic genre of the 1970s. The Louisa Bronte heroine would follow her libido to hell and beyond and the consequences  be damned!
  • How did Max Krilich get to meet the Killer Rabbit? Why was Andy Gregory glad to get the hell out of Australia? Who was the Man in the Bowler Hat? How did Ronny Gibbs get on Sale of the Century? What was Johnny Raper doing in ladies underwear...and what was the miracle at Lang Park? How did Fatty Vautin save Steve Mortimer's life? What did Freddie Jones say that shocked the PM? And what was Allan Langer doing in the USA with all those big oily men??? The answers to these and many more questions are all here in the most hilarious collection of sporting stories ever assembled in Australia. Cartoons by Scott Rigney.
  • A booklet of 24 ready-to-post picture postcards of Old Sydney from the 1870s to the 1950s. Real historical documents that include Barrack Street, 1900;  Martin Place, c. 1929; Circular Quay and the ferries of 1930; the Pyrmont Bridge, 1870; the Victoria Markets c. 1890 (where the Queen Vic building now stands); some fabulous shots of the Harbour Bridge construction and much more.  A fabulous addition to the library of a history buff. At 20.00, not even $1.00 per postcard.
  • In this volume: Badger On The Barge: Miss Brady lives on a barge, with a b adger.  She doesn't like people much, especially children and that includes Helen. But she needs her help and for Helen, that's better than staying at home. Reicker: Sean learns to deal with violence through his encounter with an old German prisoner of war and farmhand. The Egg Man: Jane learns how secrets and regrets can ruin a life. Jakey: An old, fiercely independent boatman shows Steven that hope and faith come from the inside. The Topiary Garden: Liz meets Sally Beck, who was once a boy, and makes sense of her own frustrations.  A thematic collection of the special relationship between the young and the old and suitable for any age.