Browsing the Bookshelves

We recently bought a delightful little collection of Alison Uttley books, all illustrated by Margaret Tempest.  These little children's books, such as Wise Owl's Story and Little Grey Rabbit books are wonderfully evocative of the innocence of childhood and while not particularly valuable are quite desirable and often find space on the shelves of those who collect children's books or illustrated books.  We were well pleased with our auction purchase and delighted to be able to offer a selection of Alison Uttley's books on our website.

That is until we got an email from a lovely gentleman who had bought a handful of these books from us for as a birthday present for his wife.  One of the books was an early printing but he'd noticed that the dust jacket was from a much later printing.  And we hadn't noticed.  I detest the practice of marrying dust jackets with books not only because it's often done to defraud buyers but precisely because it's very difficult to get it right. Only in this case it was damned obvious - and I'd missed it.  So, not only do I have an aggrieved customer but my professional pride is taking a punch or two as well. And it get's worse.  The next day, and another email from the same gentleman reporting that another of the Uttley books he bought had exactly the same problem.  Arrggh. This is just a disaster. 

Of course, well make it right with our book collecting customer as best we can, but I just hate it when things go wrong. Particularly when it's all my fault.  I've been had, and I didn't even notice.  And now I will have to check all the rest of those books and just sit here with fingers crossed that no other books from this lot that we've already sold have the same problem, or we'll have more angry customers over the next fews weeks.  Why do people do it?  Still, the books remain quite lovely.