A Paulina Anthology

Some books arrive with glossy covers, marketing budgets, and a laser-focused desire to be important. A Paulina Anthology arrives with something far rarer: the quiet confidence of a school community that has been producing formidable people for decades and doesn’t particularly need to shout about it.

This 2004 compilation by Howard Bailes, produced under the banner of St Paul’s Girls’ School, has the unmistakable charm of the institutional treasure. It’s not a slick, commercial publication with a barcode and a publicity tour. It’s a perfect-bound, self-published-style anthology — the sort of book made because someone cared enough to gather names, stories, achievements, and memories into one place, for the simple reason that they deserved not to drift off into the ether.

In other words: a celebration of “Paulinas” — presumably notable former pupils across the years — assembled with that particular blend of pride and understatement you tend to find in British school history. It’s the literary equivalent of a corridor display board, except you can take it home, and it won’t fall off the wall in a gust of glue failure.

The joy of this kind of book is that it isn’t trying to seduce strangers. It’s aimed at insiders: alumnae, staff, families, and the curious who like their history human-sized. You can practically feel the careful editorial hand at work — deciding what to include, how to frame it, and how to honour a long-running tradition without turning it into a trumpet solo. It’s celebratory, yes, but in that measured way that says: we’ll just list the astonishing things people have done, and let that speak for itself.

And because it’s more “community publication” than “publishing industry product,” there’s no ISBN — which somehow makes it more appealing, not less. It feels like a booklet you might discover at the back of a reunion table, next to the tea urn, quietly radiating significance.

Condition: Good — clean, presentable, and ready to be enjoyed by anyone interested in women’s education history, school culture, London institutions, or the satisfying experience of reading about accomplished people while telling yourself you are definitely going to become accomplished too, any day now.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where the rarest finds aren’t always first editions — sometimes they’re the lovingly assembled artefacts of a place that has been shaping lives for generations.

Keep browsing: See more Biography books Other books by Howard Bailes