Item #311659 AN INKEEPER'S DIARY. Introduction by Craig Brown. Illustrations by Peter Bailey. John FOTHERGILL.

AN INKEEPER'S DIARY. Introduction by Craig Brown. Illustrations by Peter Bailey.

London: The Folio Society. 2000. [2005]. Hardcover. Octavo, original decorated boards boards, green cloth spine blocked in white and black. 278 pp., Index at rear, Frontispiece and line drawings throughout the text by Bailey. This is the Fifth Impression, dated 2005 on the copyright page. Miniscule mark to fore-edges of leaves, a fine copy in slipcase. Fine in slipcase. Item #311659

¶ John Rowland Fothergill (1876 - 1957) was an English innkeeper and entrepreneur, described as a "pioneer amateur innkeeper" in Who's Who. Fothergill kept the Spreadeagle at Thame in the 1930's transforming a fairly average country pub into a venue of choice for the gentry, the dons and students of Oxford, and the glitterati. Fothergill was an incorrigible name-dropper and the great and the good adorn his pages, much as they would have done had he been a gossip columnist and there are some really great stories regailed in here. Fothergill was a kind of a forerunner of Basil Fawlty.

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