Collectable Books On the Shelf
Inside the faded red cover of this hardback book are 205 black and white images of World War Two that live up to the book's title
These days, Instagram and Facebook mean that we can look at photos from around the world almost as things happen; click the picture, upload it and it's gone global. It wasn't like that when photography depended on film and processing, dark rooms and printing before images could be made widely available. This month's collectable book comes from the immediate post-war years when the only way to see a lot of pictures of Work War Two in one go was to buy a book such as this.
Entitled The War's Best Photographs, it has long been on my bookshelves and a bookshelf at my mum and dad's for decades before that. I'm guessing that - both having lived through the Liverpool blitz - one of them bought it new before they were married.
It's hard to be precise because the book is undated but, as there are no pictures from Normandy or Germany but pictures after the allied victory in North Africa, I'd date it at 1943/44.
The War's Best Photographs was published by Odhams Press of London, a British publishing company in existence between 1920 and 1968. Originally a …
