I have the good fortune to live just down the road from Ripping Yarns, a north London secondhand bookshop that specialises in vintage children’s literature, but also has a neat line in radical books, newspapers and pamphlets. It is run by Celia Hewitt, the actress wife of the poet Adrian Mitchell.

It’s a wonderful place, brimming over with old Rupert the Bear annuals and old copies of the New Musical Express. If you pop in now you can probably still pick up an old copy of Tariq Ali’s 1968 newspaper Black Dwarf.

My best recent find was an orginal copy of the 1967 New Left May Day Manifesto, priced Two Shillings and Sixpence from 41 years ago.
Continue reading…