Thrift-store find: Wartime pet-book series from England

An occasional series that examines odd, interesting, and even valuable items found in thrift stores or at estate, yard, and garage sales. Sometimes, though, it's just old crap

These two interesting little finds—plucked from between some old hardcovers at a sidewalk “estate” sale in East Vancouver near the PNE and purchased for $1 each—represent books three and four in a 31-book series: Garden Pool Construction and (logically next) Stocking the Garden Pool.

There isn’t much information available online about the publisher of the series, Frank Ditchfield, other than that he seems to have started issuing these 32-page softcovers about pets and pet-related (mostly) subjects at about 1940, stopping around 1970. This end date is hypothesized probably because none of the covers with prices printed show England's post-decimilization (1971) currency units, although some editions have blank circles where store owners could pencil in their prices.

Most write-ups seem to agree that Ditchfield—who originally published in Edinburgh but later moved operations to Lancashire—sold lots of these (numbers unknown), mostly with the authors uncredited, and later reissued selected titles with updated covers (“greatly improved”, and, in at least one case, with a change of writer).

Blogger Malcolm Peaker writes: "They were never seen for sale in bookshops but in pet shops, hardware stores, seed merchants and fishing tackle shops. That is probably because they were cheap, very cheap."

One obvious candidate for reissue was number one, listed now as The Canary but originally with the cover title Your Canary in War Time: Valuable War Time Food Formulas.

Cover prices for the series’ books (sometimes called Ditchfield’s Little Wonder Books or Ditchfield’s Famous Pet Books but which included two on growing vegetables and flowers and a couple about fishing) ranged from fourpence to sixpence. (Number nine, The Cat, had the cover blurb, “Shilling book for sixpence”.)

There are a few dozen to be found for sale on various websites, with prices, depending on condition and selected titles’ (possibly perceived) rarity, ranging from about $2 to $30, with the majority at about $8 to $10.

Other titles covered such subjects as Tame Mice and Rats, Fishing for All Ages, Chicken Rearing and Hatching, The Golden Hamster, and Rabbit Keeping for Profit.