Last week I visited Hay-on-Wye, a little town on the Welsh/English border world famous for its bookshops and the annual literary festival held in early summer. With over 30 bookshops selling old, antiquarian and new books it’s the most brilliant place if you are a book lover or searching for an old book, and the bonus is it’s only about one hours drive from where I live. I collect old floristry books and they are few and far between, so a trip to Hay-on-Wye is a necessity now and again. Well I like to think so.There are quite a few flower-arranging books around from the 1950’s, but very few floristry ones. Gardeners on large country estates who did the flowers for the lady of the house wrote the oldest books and some chronicled their ideas, these books are a real rarity. Flower shops did not really come into their own until the Victorian era before this time flowers were usually seen in greengrocers in a few straggly containers or on market stalls. Flower arranging was the province of the wealthy. So to find an old floristry book is difficult, but this week I had such a find, the three volumes of The Practical Fruiter and Florist dating from around 1933. I could not believe my luck and guess what they were moaning about the price of flowers then. These books have such pearls of wisdom as relevant today as it was all these years ago. Nothing really changes. If you have any old floristry books let me know or are looking for a particular book let me know on my next visit I will look out for it. Have a good week.