Short Stories Of To-Day

Short Stories of To-Day (c.1930)
By Various (all terribly contemporary… for 1930)
Harrap | ISBN: none, obviously | Condition: Good (structurally honest, emotionally dramatic)
Available from: Crappy Old Books

Here we have Short Stories of To-Day, an anthology from around 1930, back when “to-day” still had a hyphen and modernity involved trams, wireless sets and respectable hats.

This is a collection of tales by Various – that mysterious, hard-working author who somehow appears in every anthology and never gets top billing. Inside you’ll find stories that were once aggressively up-to-date: relationships, moral tangles, awkward conversations in drawing rooms, possibly someone making a bold life decision and then having tea about it.

About the book’s… exposed inner life

So, confession time:

• The front and back endpapers have been torn out. Gone. Vanished. Perhaps in a fit of literary intensity, perhaps because someone needed scrap paper in 1954.

• Their dramatic absence means you can now see the cloth netting of the spine – the book’s underlying skeletal framework, previously modestly concealed, now on full display like it’s auditioning for Book Anatomy: A Visual Guide.

And yet:

• Despite this slightly theatrical undressing, the book is structurally sound.

• The text block is holding together properly, not flapping around like a bored seagull.

• The pages are all present, readable, and not disintegrating in your hands.

In other words: it looks worse than it is – a very on-brand trait for both humans and old hardbacks.

Condition: Good (with a bit of gothic charm)

“Good” here means:

• Spine: intact (if slightly revealing).

• Pages: securely held, perfectly readable. No crisis-level damage.

• General wear: the expected light scuffs, ageing and patina of a book that has survived somewhere between two and three generations of “to-day”.

• Collectability: still absolutely collectable – especially if you enjoy books with visible history and a touch of “I’ve seen some things”.

This is not a prissy, untouched, glass-cabinet specimen. It’s a working anthology with some visible hardware.

Why you might actually want this

• You enjoy the irony of a book called Short Stories of To-Day which now qualifies as a fully fledged historical artefact.

• You like your books to show a bit of their bookish skeleton – a reminder that under all those covers and decorative papers, there’s a very real structure doing its best.

• You’re fond of interwar fiction – that peculiarly poised moment between world wars, between Edwardian hangover and mid-century angst, when people were still writing about ordinary lives with quietly sharp teeth.

• You appreciate that this copy is honestly worn, not artificially “distressed” by a modern decorator with sandpaper and a Pinterest board.

The vibe

Imagine a school library, a small-town lending library, or a quiet front room with a standard lamp and someone saying, “I don’t want a whole novel, just something short before bed.” This anthology is made for that – compact, varied, and politely literary.

The stories inside are from what was then “now” and is now very much “then”. That’s part of the charm: you get everyday drama, social nuance and emotional crises from almost a century ago, all dressed in period manners and old-fashioned dialogue.

The slightly exposed spine netting just adds a hint of gothic-industrial chic:

• On a shelf, it looks like a veteran.

• In the hand, it feels reassuringly solid.

• Open, it behaves exactly as a book should: it lets you read it and doesn’t fall apart. What more do you actually need?

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where the endpapers are sometimes missing, the spine netting sometimes shows, but the stories are still very much alive – for yesterday, to-day, and whatever we’re calling this century.

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