The Old Brown Book

Undated but c 1930. 120pp, plate frontispiece, and further line drawings in text by Joyce Mercer. In buff card wrappers, with blue lettering and vignette illustration on front (wrappers are worn and faded, rubbed at edges, with rounding at corners, scuffed at spine ends with minor loss). Internally very gentle edge wear, some mild signs of fingering. Binding a little fragile. 12mo. A collection of stories for children loosely linked by a sampler, pictured in the frontispiece. Stephen Southwold is one of the pen names of Stephen Henry Critten. Critten eventually changed his name to Southwold, said to be to distance himself from this father. A prolific author, he also wrote under the names Neil Bell, Miles, Stephen Green, S H Lambert and Paul Martens. The Whitcombe’s Story Book series started in 1904 and ran to some 450 titles, reaching its height of popularity in the 1930s and early 1940s, at which time it was the largest series of children’s stories in the world.