SOLD The Dress of the People - As New * £18 €40 $85 Shipping Included (Australia and New Zealand $90)

This is a pristine hard-backed book of 430 pages and is a serious study of every day clothes - as opposed to the more familiar court clothes that tend to grab the limelight.

I loved this book because it draws on those tokens left by mothers together with their baby at the London Foundling Hospital. If you visited the Threads of Feeling exhibition at the Foundling Museum, then you would have seen some of the embroidered tokens left by mothers to identify them with their babies should they ever be in the position to reclaim them once more.

John Styles - aka Mr Amanda Vickery - has conducted excellent analysis of these fabrics to piece together the wider tale of cloths and clothing of this period. He writes in a very accessible and moving style. This is an exceptionally interesting book.

For some reason I seem to have come away with some program notes to John when he was speaking at the Foundling Museum - and I have decided to leave these in the book - not that I will ever come to reclaim it!