Fine Silks and Oak Counters - Debenhams 1778-1978
Maurice Corina
Hutchinson 1st 1978

The roots of department stores are embedded deep in Britain's social and industrial history. Fine Silks and Oak Counters tells the fascinating, and often nostalgic, story of their hitherto neglected role in the emancipation of consumers.
Drawing freely on the archives of Debenhams (1778-1978) and many other sources, Maurice Corina takes us from the early drapers who served fashionable ladies in the Georgian and Regency eras onto the great age of Victorian shopkeeping and into the competitive bustle of modem High Street trading. What emerges is a vivid portrayal of the early universal providers, whose methods for mass merchandising helped to transform society.
Whether they were great stores, whose traditions of service earned them worldwide reputations, or the pride of cafe society in a local community, each pioneered excellence in shopkeeping. Their influence in the growth of towns and cities was enormous.
This lavishly illustrated book recalls the ambience and style of stores fitted in the grand manner as well as popular premises when managers were High Street showmen, making no distinctions between income groups. It takes us behind the scenes of exciting struggles for trading supremacy and examines the sentiments of many great retailers, some of whose names remain over the stores they built but most of whom are long forgotten.

4to. Very, very minor bumps to the boards; very, very minor creasing to the dustwrapper, otherwise the book is in VG++ condition in a VG++ wrapper. 835 gms £10.00

Metal Box - a history
W J Reader
Heinemann 1st 1976

The central theme of this history is the transformation of the tin-box making and printing industries of late Victorian England into the packaging industry of the present day, working with great diversity of materials. The broad social background is a widespread and continuous rise in working class standards of living. During the 'thirties, Metal Box played a major role in the introduction into the United Kingdom of the technology of
high-speed canning, including both the making of cans and the machinery required for filling and closing them. The result, in what is often regarded as a period of universal depression, was the foundation of a new and flourishing branch of the British food industries. As soon as the new technology was established in the United Kingdom, Metal Box began exporting it: a policy which has been greatly intensified in the last thirty years. The book is therefore also a study of multi-national business, a British success story in a period when British success has gone largely unnoticed. Metal Box owes a great deal to Sir Robert Barlow, whose remarkable character and achievements are fully and freely discussed. Students of social and economic history, managers, and in fact anyone concerned with private capitalism and how it works (which is not always how it is said to work), will gain a clearer insight from this book into the way British business has developed in the past, leading, perhaps, to a better grasp of its problems and possibilities in the present and future.

8vo. VG++ in a VG++ wrapper. 615 gms. £20.00

A Fabric Huge - The Story of Listers
Mark Keighley
James & James 1989

This book tells with wit and erudition the history of a great mill and textile manufacturer. The story has many strands: Victorian enterprise on a grand scale, the experience of a major industry over many stormy years, changes of fashion, the evolution of design and production of fabrics
in many forms and uses, the dramas of war and peace, and last but not least the people of Bradford. Lord Briggs points out in his distinguished foreword that this is not only a substantial piece of Victorian industrial history; the twentieth century part of the story is equally remarkable. The book concludes with an account of a radical development for Manningham Mills giving the buildings an important new cultural and business function for many years to come.

4to paperback, 96 pages in Fine condition. 400 gms £15.00

Schweppes - the first 20 years
Douglas A Simmons
Springwood Books 1st 1983

This is the remarkable story of Schweppes, the oldest mineral water manufacturer in the world, from the 18th Century to the 1980's. It begins with the story of Jacob Schweppe, the jeweller and amateur scientist of Geneva who came to England with the invention which helped to create an industry. It goes onto describe the growth of the firm that he founded with its ups and dons, from the Napoleonic Wars, through the long years of Queen Victoria's reign, to the 2oth Century and the world-wide presence which Schweppes enjoys today. It is the story of a succession of highly individual innovators and adventurers whose belief never wavered in the paramount importance of quality.
Douglas Simmons’s researches have uncovered much fascinating material, hitherto unpublished, which makes his very readable account a contribution to social history as well as the story of a strikingly unusual company.
This is also, of course, the sparkling history of Schweppes advertising from the early announcements ‘to the Nobility, Gentry, the Faculty and the Public in general’ to the brilliant campaigns which made household words of Schweppervescence, Schweppshire and Sch... you know who!

4to. Gold titling to spine; very, very minor sunning to the dustwrapper spine, otherwise the book is in Fine condition in a VG++ wrapper. 1045 gms £10.00

A Sense of Security: 150 years of Prudential
Laurie Dennett
Granta Editions 1st 1998

The Company known worldwide as `the Prudential' — and in the United Kingdom, where at one time every third household was insured with it, as `the Pru' — has played an integral part in the commercial and social life of the nation for the past 150 years. Today it is one of Britain's largest institutional investors,, and its major provider of life insurance, pensions and allied financial services.

A Sense of Security examines the history of the Company that began in 1848 'with less capital than optimism, after a false start, at a less than auspicious time and in an insignificant place' and within the space of a generation rose to become a national institution. Its strength was built on industrial insurance — life assurance for the working classes, involving the weekly collection of small premiums by agents — along the lines developed by its dynamic and visionary Secretary, Henry Harben. This was only the beginning of a success story like no other, for Prudential's activities would eventually embrace most areas of insurance, and be carried abroad into 34 countries.

For much of its 150 years, Prudential has been the most powerful force in the insurance industry, in the vanguard of product development and service to policyholders, its influence helping to shape legislation that still affects us all. A Sense of Security avoids a narrow focus: well known figures — from W.E. Gladstone and Sir Alfred Waterhouse to Horatio Bottomley — come alive, `the Man from the Pru acquires a human face, and Prudential's unique corporate culture receives its due. From the development of National Insurance to the battle against nationalisation, from the Great War to the information revolution, A Sense of Security offers a comprehensive and lively account of a great Company.

4to. Very minor bumps to the boards, minor creasing to the bottom edge of the dustwrapper, otherwise the book is in VG++ condition in a VG++ wrapper. 1630 gms £12.00

The Glassmakers - Pilkington 1826 -1976
T C Barker
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1st 1977

This is the story, through good times and difficult ones, of one of Britain's leading manufacturers, Pilkington Brothers Limited. It is told with full and free access to the company's accounts and other business records. Intimate financial and other details of what was probably Britain's largest private family company are revealed for the first time down to 1939, and subsequent continued growth is chronicled in an epilogue chapter.
It aims to be an honest history in that it deals with the company's mistakes as well as its successes.
Professor Barker shows how, from a small factory in St Helens in the 1820s, the first two generations of the glassmaking family built up the export as well as the home sales of the firm until, by the beginning of the present century, it had emerged as one of the major producers of plate and window glass in the world.
Since 1900, and especially since 1945, it has become a leading international company with factories in all five continents. World status has involved technical and commercial competition and collaboration with the few surviving manufacturers of world class, and there is much to be found in these pages about international glassmaking diplomacy.
The float process, which the company developed after the early 1950s, the most important single technical advance in the whole history of this branch of the glass industry, greatly strengthened Pilkington's bargaining position.
The book will be read with interest in the United States and on the continent of Europe as well as in Britain and the Commonwealth.

4to. Very, very minor marking to cloth covered boards, very minor creasing to the top edge of the dustwrapper, otherwise the book is in VG++ condition in a VG++ wrapper. 1130 gms £20.00