First stop was a junk shop staffed by a rather interesting crew, and containing a fine selection of books, complete with dust jackets, by Dornford Yates, never before heard of, but clearly a force to be reckoned with in the period between the wars.
Wikipedia tells me that he spent most of his time at Oxford doing amateur dramatics and probably in consequence only took a third, which meant it was a bit of a struggle to get into law, winding up as a criminal barrister. Honourable service in the first war, mainly in the Middle East, after which he became a full time writer. Emigrated to East Africa after the second war.
He presumably did alright, with the book illustrated bottom right running to a library edition reprinted 20 times between 1921 and 1944 - a total of over 120,000 copies. Published by Ward Locke, whom I remember as the publishers of the Red Guides which used to be used for my family holidays as a child, while BH remembers them as the people who published the sort of novels you could buy in Woolworths. Light fiction for ladies. While the junk shop people said that one lady who had come in a few weeks previously had gone weak at the knees as, after many moons searching, she was finally able to plug the gaps in her Dornford Yates collection. BH has now read both of them, liking bottom right, rather in the Jeeves & Wooster vein, rather better than top left.
So he was a very well known man in his day; now more or less unheard of. What chance the rest of us? Sic transit gloria mundi.
The shop also offered a bedside locker which had been decorated in découpage, a technique I may have come across before, but not for a very long time. As it happened, a technique which cropped up as a form of all-over wall decoration in an adaptation of a P. D. James novel, 'A Certain Justice', which we watched on return to Epsom.
Next stop the Bognor Regis museum housed in a former Public House. Stuffed full of all kinds of memorabilia, including the sort of refrigerator I remember having as a child. Also a room full of ancient radios and televisions. And also a case memorialising a black day for the Royal Sussex Regiment. It seems that three battalions of this regiment - the 11th, 12th and 13th - were given the task of creating a diversion just before the Battle of the Somme was due to start somewhere else. The colonel of the 11th battalion, when he saw the plans, refused to perform as asked. He was sent on leave: perhaps the recent death of his son on active service was deemed enough not to treat him more severely - which I am sure the letter of military law would have allowed. I associate to Siegfried Sassoon's experiences after he mounted a protest. See reference 1. The colonel's consolation prize was that his battalion was switched into reserve from attack. The 13th battalion was subsequently more or less wiped out and the 12th battalion lost 446 officers and men, killed, wounded and missing, around half the starting total.
And thirdly, a second hand bookshop, which on first appearances appeared to function mainly as an exchange for paperback fiction for holiday reading. A function it had been filling, we learned as we got further inside, for thirty years or more. Further inside still, I found the other two books illustrated. Bottom left, a sort of history of everything, from around 10,000 years ago until the present, strong on Borneo and surrounding areas, where I think the author did a lot of botanical field work. Looks interesting enough, but I have yet to make a proper start. Top right, an Esperanto dictionary, a dictionary that is in the same sense that the Oxford Dictionary is a dictionary of English - so being entirely in Esperanto. First impression is that Esperanto looks rather like Spanish and the dictionary is just about intelligible, at least in parts. Further reports on both in due course.
PS: one of the D-Y dust jackets did not survive the reading and has now been mended with a slice of white printing paper (Staples blue wrap) and Pritt Stick. Much better than mucking around with bottles of glue, the glue in which has usually gone off by the time one wants to use it,
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/sassoon-not.html.
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