A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby

A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby lands on the shelves of my shop.

HarperCollins, 1994, Hardback in dust wrapper.

From the cover: In 1967, Eric Newby and his wife Wanda fulfilled a long-cherished ambition when they acquired I Castagni (otherwise The Chestnuts), a small and excessively ruined farmhouse in the foothills of the Apuan Alps on the borders of Liguria and northern Tuscany. They were the first foreigners to live in the area, and twenty-five years later they remained the only ones.

The house came with a tileless roof, a long-abandoned septic tank and a lavatory hidden in a dense plantation of canes in the open air. It also contained a wealth of indigenous wildlife: a large colony of cockroaches; a hornets nest; an adder which shed its skin every year on a beam in the owners bedroom; predatory mice the size of small cats who used red flannel from Eric Newbys favourite shirts to line their offsprings nests; and, not least, a sitting tenant, Attilio a minute, eccentric and very ancient man who had once built an aeroplane in which he had launched himself from a high place and crashed, hurting himself badly.

In this affectionate, humorous, often hilarious book, Eric Newby recounts how he and Wanda, who met in Italy in 1943 after he escaped from a POW camp, pulled I Castagni from the brink of collapse with the aid of the local esperti (skilled workmen). It describes their long-enduring friendship with the neighbouring contadini, who welcomed them whether eating, drinking, harvesting grapes and olives, or hunting for fungus and wild asparagus from the moment they arrived.

In Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby described the start of his love affair with Italy; in A Small Place in Italy, with his inimitable wry humour and eye for the quirks and oddities of human nature, he chronicles how it grew to maturity.

Good+ in Good+ Dust Wrapper. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper. Leans. Top edge of the text block spotted. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Blue boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. 211 pages. 9½” x 6¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Rogue Trader by Nick Leeson with Edward Whitley

Rogue Trader by Nick Leeson with Edward Whitley lands on the shelves of my shop.

Little, Brown & Co., 1996, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black and White Photographs;

From the cover: Few news stories have grabbed the worlds headlines quite like the collapse of Barings merchant bank in late February 1995.

Trusted with the finances of royalty and aristocracy for over two hundred years, Barings had apparently been brought down by the covert trading activities of just one man, leaving the bank with losses of around £850 million.

The fate of that man, Nick Leeson, is now well known. But, until the publication of Rogue Trader, Leesons role in the affair has been shrouded in rumour and speculation. The story he has to tell surpasses the feats of imagination of the most creative novelist: the candid, compelling and true confession of a pure gambler who found himself sucked into a spiral of terrifying loss.

Rogue Trader takes us from Leesons humble beginnings as a Watford plasterers son to the very heart of the cut-and-thrust empire he made his own: SIMEX, the Singapore money market that witnessed both Leesons phenomenal rise to prominence and devastating fall from grace. It is a portrait of organised chaos in one of the most stressful jobs in the world, showing us the frenetic culture of the trading pit and revealing not only the forces that led him to use the infamous 88888 account, but also the ways in which he dealt with the losses, avoided detection, and participated in the near-farcical endgame which sparked the most extraordinary news story in recent years. The world marvelled as he and his wife Lisa, who until then had known nothing of the losses, made their escape as the bank collapsed around them, only to return to acknowledge the results of Leesons activities and face their onerous consequences.

Pressure, pace, error: Leeson reveals in breathtaking style the inside story of this amazing chain of events. Crackling with dialogue and characters, in a narrative as crisp as any thriller, Rogue Trader is the hugely compelling account of a man shaped by events that proved beyond his control.

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Navy Blue boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XI] 273 pages. 9½” x 6¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!