PBOTD 9th June: Allen Seaby - Dinah the Dartmoor

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Today's PBOTD marks a return to my bookselling career - though not one of its more glorious episodes.  I have a labrador - there she is, below, all seal eyed and innocent looking. What the picture does not tell you is that if we were stupid enough to leave her on her own in the kitchen, she'd be up on the table, stealing everything she could reach. And she can reach much, much further than you'd think.

Holly
Fortunately she's not generally a chewer. She occasionally forgets herself in the garden and decides to prune a bush, but she's not a wrecker. Generally. I am not a tidy worker, and when I bought books, they would be arranged in piles round my desk while I added them to the database and got them ready for sale.

I'd not intended to collect Allen Seaby's books, because I find them quite dull. One day, when I was surrounded by the usual heaps of books, dog wandered in, selected Allen Seaby's Dinah the Dartmoor from the piles, and sliced through the front cover. Reader, it had to be mine. I've read some odd book descriptions in my time but thought it was pushing it somewhat to expect someone to buy a book where the description read "generally good, but front has deep tear where the dog bit it."

The first picture isn't my copy. Mine doesn't have a dj. You can see the evidence in pic 2.


A&C Black, 1935

The evidence

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