Evi Heinz

Any researcher working on the material aspects of literature knows how easy it is to accidentally become a book collector.

On this Blog, I may, from time to time, share some notes on the items that have ended up in my ‘collection’ over the past few years. Beginning with …

I came across this Edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Years, published in 1937 by the Hogarth Press, in a Charity Shop in the north of England.

At First glance, there is nothing particularly unusual about it – except for a curious discolouration on the lower part of the cover.

The Shape of this discolouration suggests that the book once bore the emblem of the boots booklovers library (see below), A commercial circulating library that, by the late 1930s, had over 460 branches all over britain.¹¹

A look inside the book quickly confirms this suspicion: Tipped in between the copyright page and the beginning of the text, we find a slip inviting the members of the Boots booklovers library to become book-buyers.

Luckily for the book historians among us, this particular slip was not filled in and detached by an eager reader.

Still, this copy of The Years made its way out of the Boots Booklovers Library eventually. You just cannot beat that Bargain price!

1. Nicola Wilson, ‘Boots Book-Lovers’ Library and the Novel: The Impact of a Circulating Library Market on Twentieth-Century Fiction’, Information & Culture, 49 (2014), 427-49 (p. 429). ↩︎