New Partnership between Parthian, Library of Wales and the Dylans Mobile Bookstore

Last Saturday the monthly edition of the Uplands Market in Swansea hosted the distinctive Dylans Mobile Bookstore and its latest addition in terms of car-accessorizing: a brand new sign marking the recent partnership with Parthian Books and the Library of Wales.

Jeff Towns, author, treasure-hunter, book collector/dealer (and skilled bus-driver) was there to celebrate the event. Jeff is the editor of A Pearl of Great Price, a collection of previously unpublished Dylan Thomas’ love letters to his American mistress Pearl Kazin. A second edition of the book is imminent, following a successful February debut to coincide with the kick-start of the DT100 festival.  

 

As one of most prominent authorities on all Dylan Thomas ‘matters, Jeff is  currently working on a book about Nora Summers, painter, photographer and close friend of the Thomas’ household. She lived in a community with her husband, fellow artist Gerald Summers, and Yvonne Macnamara’s family, later becoming her lover and muse. Yvonne was the mother of Caitlin, future wife of Dylan Thomas, who later bitterly described Nora as “the father figure of our girlhood and an evil one”. Being so intimate with the family, Nora portrayed Dylan and Caitlin in several occasions, shooting them in one of their most iconic photograph, the one at the Baker Hotel in 1938.

 

Also at the event was Andrew Green, former chief executive of the National Library of Wales and author of the forthcoming In The Chair: How to Guide Groups and Manage Meetings (Parthian, September 2014). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Photographs by Michael Watson from Swansea University. You can have a look at his brilliant portfolio here).