All About Books

06/09/2026

📚 FROM THE SHELVES

Two Little Savages — Ernest Thompson Seton, 1910

Some books are worth picking up just to look at the pictures and illustrations.

This beautifully decorated 1910 edition of Two Little Savages follows two boys as they learn about life outdoors — camping, tracking, wildlife and woodcraft — illustrated throughout with more than 200 drawings by Seton himself.

And they’re everywhere. Detailed full-page studies of birds and wildlife sit alongside wonderful little sketches tucked amongst the text — frogs, tracks, plants and all manner of things from the natural world.

Seton was a naturalist, wildlife artist and pioneer of the early Woodcraft movement, whose ideas would subsequently influence the development of Scouting.

Even the book itself is a work of art. The decorated cloth binding, with its birds, flowers, moons and arrowheads, and the striking illustrated title page make this a particularly lovely survivor from 1910.

116 years old and still rather beautiful.

📚 Two Little Savages — Ernest Thompson Seton
Archibald Constable & Co., 1910
About Books, Pitlochry

05/09/2026

Behind the Bookseller’s Desk 📚

The books that have been watching me work…

If you’ve visited the shop, you may have noticed these rather handsome leather-bound volumes sitting on the shelves behind the till.

They’re a wonderful collection of 50 Oldham’s Classics from 1930s— Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Scott, Shakespeare, Darwin, Defoe, Cervantes, Dumas, and many more — all in matching tooled bindings with gilt titles.

They include Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, Ivanhoe and The Origin of Species, alongside some titles that perhaps aren’t quite so familiar today.

They’re exactly the sort of books that make a second-hand bookshop feel like a second-hand bookshop, and they’re beautifully decorative. In amazing condition too given they are almost 100 years old.

Behind the Bookseller’s Desk is our occasional peek at the books, objects and curiosities that surround me while I’m working at All About Books.

📚 All About Books, Pitlochry

04/09/2026

📚 Treasure of the Week: The Bitter Conquest

If you read my posts you’ll know sometimes the real treasure isn’t on the cover…

This week’s find is Charity Blackstock’s The Bitter Conquest, first published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1959.

Set in Scotland in 1750, just four years after Culloden, it’s a historical novel set against the uneasy aftermath of the Jacobite Rising.

A lovely enough find in its own right — a first edition still wearing its original illustrated dust jacket.

But then we opened it…

Inside is a handwritten inscription:

“To Andy,
from the author,
with love & thanks.”

Charity Blackstock was the pen name of novelist Ursula Torday, and research so far suggests that this may well be a presentation copy personally inscribed by the author.

Who was Andy? And what was she thanking him for?

So far, I haven’t been able to find out — which perhaps makes it even more intriguing.

A 1959 first edition, a Jacobite tale, and a little mystery hidden between the covers.

Exactly the sort of thing that makes second-hand bookshops so much fun. ❤️📚

Treasure of the Week at All About Books, Pitlochry.

03/09/2026

🎭 HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE…

With Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days coming to Pitlochry Festival Theatre later this month, we’ve been having a rummage through the shelves — and look what we found!

A small selection of Samuel Beckett books, including copies of Happy Days, are now in stock at All About Books, Pitlochry.

So, if you’re heading to the theatre to see the amazing Siobhán Redmond and Forbes Masson and fancy reading the play beforehand — or perhaps afterwards when you’re wondering what on earth you’ve just witnessed 😄 — pop in for a browse.

📚 Happy Days and other Beckett titles available while stocks last.

🎭 All About Books | Pitlochry
Second-hand books, curious finds & the occasional bit of nonsense.

31/08/2026

📚 MONDAY BOOKISH FACT

This beauty is hiding inside an 1890s volume of Robert Burns. ❤️📖

It’s marbled paper — traditionally created by floating colours on liquid, carefully forming those wonderful swirling patterns, then transferring the design onto paper.

One of the loveliest things about traditional hand marbling?

✨ No two sheets are exactly alike.

More than 130 years later, just look at those colours!

Sometimes the most beautiful part of an old book is hiding between the pages. 📖✨

📍 All About Books | Pitlochry

31/08/2026

📚 MONDAY BOOKISH FACT

Ever wondered how these beautiful swirling patterns inside old books were made?

This is paper marbling — and this particularly lovely example comes from an 1890s volume of Robert Burns Poetical Works currently at All About Books. ❤️📖

Traditional marbled paper was made by floating colours on the surface of a liquid, carefully manipulating them into patterns, and then laying paper onto the surface to pick up the design.

The wonderful thing?

No two hand-marbled sheets are exactly alike.

Marbled paper became a familiar decorative feature of bookbinding, particularly on the endpapers of fine and beautifully bound books.

More than a century later, the colours in this Burns volume are still absolutely glorious.

Sometimes you really do have to look inside an old book to find its most beautiful feature.

📚 All About Books | Pitlochry

30/08/2026

📚 SUNDAY FROM THE SHELVES

Sometimes an old book makes you work a little harder to discover its age…

This week’s find is a wonderfully worn copy of Sir Walter Scott’s The Abbot, Volume XI of the Waverley Novels.

But how old is it?

The answer is hidden in a rather lovely bit of Roman numeral detective work:

MDCCCXLII

M = 1000
D = 500
CCC = 300
XL = 40
II = 2

Put it all together and we have…

1842. 📖

And then the book gave us a second clue.

Still bound inside is the original prospectus for the People’s Edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Novels, announcing that publication would begin on Saturday, 15 January 1842, issued in affordable weekly parts.

The publishers explained that they hoped this new edition would put Scott’s novels “within the reach of the masses.”

More than 180 years later, “180 years”…this copy has survived — complete with its blind-stamped cloth binding, gilt lettering and that fascinating little piece of Victorian publishing history.

It’s battered, rubbed and certainly showing its age.

Which, frankly, at 184 years old, it has every right to. ❤️📚

Sunday from the Shelves , Pitlochry.

29/08/2026

🗺️ CURIOSITY CORNER 🗺️

A little trip back to the Cairngorms in 1964…

We found this fabulous vintage Ordnance Survey Tourist Map of the Cairngorms — cloth-backed, one inch to the mile and wrapped in a rather magnificent red tartan cover. ❤️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

And look at the original price:

15/- NET

That’s 15 shillings — 75p in decimal money, but roughly equivalent to around £20 today in purchasing power.

Maps were made to be used, folded, stuffed into rucksacks and taken on adventures.

And 62 years later, this one has found its way to us.

📚 Between the pages… or this time, between the folds.

28/08/2026

15/08/2026

📖 From The Shelves…

“The Clyack Sheaf”

Every so often a book arrives in the shop whose title sends me off down a wee rabbit hole…

The Clyack Sheaf by David Toulmin did just that.

But what exactly is a clyack sheaf?

🌾 “Clyack” is an old Scots word associated with harvest time. The clyack sheaf was traditionally the last sheaf of corn cut at the end of the harvest — and its cutting was something worth celebrating.

The sheaf could be decorated and carried home, marking the completion of the harvest, followed by the clyack supper: food, drink, music and celebration for everyone who had helped bring the crop in.

So the title is rather perfect.

David Toulmin gathers together his own “sheaf” of memories, people and stories from a way of rural Scottish life that has largely disappeared.

And that’s one of the things I love about second-hand books. Sometimes you pick one up because of an unfamiliar word on the cover…and end up discovering a little piece of Scottish history.

📚 The Clyack Sheaf — currently on the shelves at All About Books, Pitlochry.

📚 Helping great books find new homes… and keeping great stories alive.