Solitaire Books

We specialise in fine printing and typography, with an emphasis on UK Private Presses. We are always interested in receiving emails about UK fine printing so, if you have any questions, comments, requests, interesting facts about printers and presses, or items to sell, please email us.

We have a particular affection for the books printed in the Fell Types collected for Oxford Univerity Press by Bishop John Fell in the seventeenth Century. Copies of these books printed after 1861 may be found in our catalogue; one of them, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is illustrated above.

The leading authority on the Fell Types was Harry Carter (1901 - 1982), father of the great type designer Matthew Carter. Harry Carter's writings on typographical matters are always worth reading. He is at once authoritative, lucid, opinionated and witty, and his writing style makes his great scholarship as accessible to the amateur as to the scholar. Many of Harry's books will also be found in our catalogue, and a brief appreciation of his life is elsewhere on this site.