To celebrate the Easter holiday, all our books have had their prices reduced by 10%. This offer will end on Monday 28th April, so take advantage of it while you can!
Also be sure to check our selection of Easter-themed books.
Happy Easter!
With most of us feeling the pinch this Christmas, buying gifts for loved ones can seem somewhat daunting.
So, we are pleased to announce that from the 5th December through to the 20th December, all our books will have their prices reduced by 10%.
All you need to do is add the book(s) you want to your basket, and the appropriate deduction will be made at the checkout.
And for added convenience, all our Christmas-themed books can be found in their own, dedicated Christmas section.
Happy shopping!
After Winter hijacked March (and most of April!), Spring is finally here – heralded by the first flowers on cherry trees, and the glorious sunshine.
To celebrate the arrival of warmer days and colourful parks and gardens, we have reduced the price of over 100 books from a wide variety of categories and genres by up to 50% – including some rare first editions!
Visit our Home Page where we have on display a small selection of the books on offer. Or just jump straight into the sale itself – you might just find that book you’ve always been after is now at an unmissable price!
Happy hunting!
It’s been a busy past few weeks here at L.W.C. Halls, what with all the new books we’ve been cataloguing and uploading, but with Christmas almost at our doorstep, we thought it only right to impart a little info!
Firstly – and most importantly! – this is the final week during which you will be able to place an order on our web site. The final day is Friday 20th December, although it is highly unlikely that the book(s) will arrive in time for Christmas if left that late, so those of you who have left the gift-buying to the last minute will want to make your way very quickly to our dedicated Christmas section where you will find an Aladdin’s Cave of festive books!
Also don’t forget that our Home Page features a daily selection of 20 of our most interesting seasonal books!
Secondly, we are happy to announce that the 10% Christmas Discount, which has been in effect over the past few weeks, will remain in place until the 31st December 2012!!!
Finally, we would like to wish all our customers (past, present, and future!) a very merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!
We are happy to announce that the ISBN search facility is now ready! You can find it in the Quick Search box on the left of our home page.
Since July, we have recorded the (I)SBNs of just over 1,000 books, and will continue to add more over the coming weeks.
It is worth mentioning that early editions of books in our inventory (which are still in print) may not have a Standard Book Number or will only feature the 9-digit SBN. These books cannot be located using either the 10- or 13-digit ISBN as that would defeat the purpose of the search.
Similarly, books which only received a standard 10-digit ISBN when they were first published can only be located via that ISBN. Entering their ISBN-13 equivalent will not return any results.
We hope you find the new Standard Book Number search facility useful!
When we first set up our book business, the thought of recording each title’s ISBN hadn’t crossed our minds. It didn’t seem likely to us that anyone would bother searching for a book via this method.
Two years later it became apparent how naïve we had been. In 90% of cases, a book’s ISBN will uniquely identify that edition. For example, if someone were trying to track down a copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince published by Penguin under their Puffin imprint, entering the ISBN 0140304975 would locate it instantly.
Much like collectors of long playing records will jot down an album’s catalogue number, book collectors will do the same with an ISBN, in order to ensure that the copy they’re acquiring is the one they really want.
Currently, we have recorded the ISBNs and SBNs (more on the latter in a moment) of precisely 500 books. Soon we will introduce an additional function to our search facility which will allow you to locate a book using either the standard 10-digit ISBN, the newer 13-digit ISBN, and the rarer 9-digit SBN.
The SBN, or Standard Book Number, was first introduced in 1966 by W.H. Smith – the famous British stationer and bookseller – but not widely adopted by publishers until the end of the 1960s.
Four years later, in 1970, the SBN became international, and the ISBN was born. In Britain, most publishers switched to the new 10-digit system, although several continued to use the old 9-digit SBN until 1974. Whilst ISBN-13 is credited as being an invention of the past 3 years, it was actually introduced far earlier. The first barcoded 13-digit ISBNs appeared in 1982. On rare occasions, it was even possible for a book to contain all three identification methods: the old SBN plus the 10-digit and 13-digit ISBN.
There are, however, a number of caveats regarding the International Standard Book Number. As we have mentioned earlier, there is a 10% chance that an ISBN will not pinpoint the exact edition of a given book. This is because publishers tend to retain a book’s ISBN even if the cover has changed. The ISBN will only be revised if the book is published in a different format or if some alterations have been made to the text and/or illustrations. For this reason, both the 1995 and 2004 editions of Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger share exactly the same ISBN – despite being almost 10 years apart and with different cover artwork – because the illustrations are still by Quentin Blake, and the text has not been abridged.
Today marks a milestone in the total number of foreign language books we have in stock. The addition of Zoé et Théo and Mes amis: Les Chats has brought the figure to a round 200.
The most ‘international’ of these is a booklet published in 2011 on behalf of the European Union. Its title is “United in Diversity” printed in no less than 22 different languages, which definitely makes it a strong candidate for the book with the longest title ever!
Whilst almost half of these books are in French (93, to be precise), the remainder is formed of titles in such diverse languages as Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Somali, Welsh, and even Latin.
In fact, our shelves carry books in over 25 different languages, and the full list can be viewed in our dedicated Foreign Language section.
Beatus pasco! Happy browsing!
Treat yourself or someone special to a great read this Christmas!
From the 8th November until the 20th December, every single book in our store will have its price reduced by 10%.
Simply add the book(s) you want to your basket, and the appropriate deduction will be made at the checkout.
So whether you fancy a first edition Enid Blyton or are looking for a retro cookery book with ’70s nouvelle cuisine, there are savings to be had on absolutely everything!
And for added convenience, all our Christmas-themed books can be found in our special Christmas section.
Happy shopping!
Two super-rare titles by this acclaimed Dutch illustrator have recently graced our bookshelves. Peter and his puppy and My Fairy Stories.
Wilhelmina ‘Willy’ Schermelé was born in in Amsterdam in April 1904. Although well-known as a gifted illustrator, she actually began her career as an actress in the 1920s, performing in the Amsterdam Grand Théâtre’s renditions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Peer Gynt.
It wasn’t until the early ’30s that Schermelé began writing and illustrating children’s stories and poems – mainly for the newspaper De Telegraaf (The Telegraph). She also wrote and illustrated many stories for Geïllustreerd Stuiversblad (The Penny Illustrated Journal), including De avonturen van Bartje en Zwartje (1931); Kater Kwik (1932); Jaap en zijn Aap (1932) De avonturen van Kees and Kikkie (1934); and Met z’n Drieën (1936). Perhaps her most famous – or indeed infamous! – book is Het Groote Negerboek (The Big Negro Book), which was published c.1932
She briefly moved to England in the 1950s, where she illustrated a number of books for Enid Blyton. These include: My Enid Blyton Story Book (1950) and Enid Blyton’s Good Morning Book (1952). Schermelé returned to Holland in 1957, where she began work on her 8-part Winkie series.
We’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a blog for a while now, but could never find the time to do so – what with all the books that need to be catalogued, described, &c. Still, better late than never – as that wise saying goes. So what can you expect to find on here over the coming weeks and months?
Well, the exact particulars haven’t been set in stone yet, but we will be providing info on all our latest acquisitions, plus articles on particularly rare and/or interesting books which have recently found their way onto our bookshelves.
In the meantime, please visit www.littlewhitecrow.co.uk where you can browse through our entire stock. And remember, if there’s a book on there that you like that doesn’t yet have an image, then please don’t hesitate to drop us a line and we will be more than happy to provide you with further details.
Little White Crow 