The Worthing Antique, Arts and Collectors Club meet on the first Tuesday of the month in Field Place, Worthing – and this month I was the guest speaker. This was great fun and I need to thank the tireless secretary, Pip, for giving me the chance to do something I have been planning to do for ages. I love talking about old books and as I suspected people love hearing about them too.
Rather than just talking and holding up the odd book I decided to bring along six big boxes of old books, one for each table, and let the audience look through them. And that, as they say, was that!
Half an hour later we chatted about what we had found and I answered some questions. Some members re-discovered books from their childhood and one even found a reference to her Dad in an old Worthing directory. ‘You never know what you’ll find’ just keeps on turning out to be true, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately I forgot to take any photos so I’m illustrating this post with a very old image of Worthing, dating from the 1840s. It shows ‘A Birds-eye View taken from the top of the Sea House Hotel’ and was drawn by G. Atwick and engraved by T Jeavons. It was published in Brighton by J. Smith of 8, Pool Valley. It is hand coloured, something we discussed in the talk, and is scarcer than I realised. There are no other images of it on the net, so here it is for you to enjoy.
I can recommend the Worthing Collectors Club, by the way – they have some very interesting speakers on all sorts of topics. I met a lot of lovely people and I hope to see some again soon at The Lewes Book fair on March 17th in the Town Hall. And if you run a similar club in Sussex please do get in touch – I’ve got a lot of fascinating old books in those boxes!
J. Smith, Brighton, 1845. First edition. An original hand coloured engraving.
