It was a Bank Holiday in the UK yesterday so here is Bank Holiday 1912 by William Strang (1859-1921) © Tate. As ever, it's all in the detail – the flowers on the chair, the young man not quite knowing what to order, the waiter's expression, the way she is holding her hands. And the man in the background, whose head is so lifelike. All in all, this really is a short story.

Finally, for this week, here is the newly opened, very beautiful, Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in London.

And here is Politics and Prose bookshop in Washington, DC which is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary. Today the wood-engraver Gwen Raverat would have been celebrating her birthday: she was born 26th August 1885.

Another West London gem: the Heywood Hill bookshop. It should also be mentioned that today would have been Mollie Panter-Downes's birthday - she was born on 25th August 1906.

The brilliant John Sandoe Books in Chelsea, London.

This week: five of our favourite bookshops (more to follow later in the year). First up is the famous Shakespeare and Co in Paris.

'The Wife' 1929 by Tirzah Ravilious, from The Wood Engravings of Tirzah Ravilious (1987), taken from Quarterly No. 13 for Spring 2002. (The expression on her face, and the pretty but slightly impractical positioning of the table and chairs, says hotel room rather than everyday life. And therefore, perhaps, the honeymoon.)

This is a rather sad picture which we found at the local photographer's shop at Montana when we went there to research The Montana Stories, a collection of the stories Katherine Mansfield wrote in the last year of her life: at the bottom of the card it says 'on ne recoit pas de malades' – ie. no tuberculosis patients. From The Persephone Quarterly No. 10 Summer 2001 (the first quarterly with our new telephone number: we had moved to Lamb's Conduit Street in early June).

From the same Quarterly, a few pages further on and in the middle of a short story by Dorothy Canfield Fisher: a woodcut by Gwen Raverat from Mountains and Molehills by Frances Cornford 1935.

'The Writer' by Rex Whistler from The New Keepsake 1931 p144 from The Persephone Quarterly No. 5 March 2000

Second thoughts: perhaps a week not specifically of woodcuts but of black and white pictures, still of course taken from old quarterlies. This engraving of of a study in Newnham Hall, as it was then, during the late 1870s (Amy Levy's time) appeared in Quarterly No. 4 for December 1999.

Gwenda Morgan's Summer Flowers c. 1930 appeared in Persephone Quarterly No. 6 for Summer 2000. (Maybe next week we should have a week of woodcuts – when the Quarterly was in black and white, which was up until 2003, we had several woodcuts per issue.)

Haytime in the Cotswolds by James Bateman 1893-1959 © Southampton City Art Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library. From the Persephone Biannually No. 4.

Lydia is on holiday in France at the moment. This is one of her favourite paintings. It is Sickert's The Bathers, Dieppe 1902 and is at the Walker in Liverpool. Although thirty years earlier than The Fortnight in September, and in another country, it illustrates it perfectly.

Autumn 2002 was when Greenery Street was first published by us: we turned the original cover of the book into a postcard (and try to remember to send one out free with every copy of the book) which was reproduced in black and white in the Persephone Quarterly (No. 15). In the same issue this – for the 1928 sequel – appeared, also in black and white; but thanks to the internet it can now appear in colour. Both paintings were by EH Shepard, who illustrated AA Milne. (And where's the link to yesterday's post? Well, obviously, Greenery Street is a perfect holiday read!)

We have had two sixteen year-olds on work experience in the last month, Imogen and Camilla: both were brilliantly helpful and we rather envy their future employers. One of the things they did was scan in pictures from old Persephone Quarterlies and Biannuallies (still available from us for £1 each inc. postage), which is why some of you will recognise the pictures on this week's Post. These will focus on holidays, or at least on lazing around. First up: a c. 1910 advertisement reproduced in PQ No. 5 in March 2000.

We try to make the Post as cheery as possible but sometimes needs must: seventy years ago this summer the French were fleeing the Germans (cf. Dimanche). The photograph is by Therese Bonney © Bridgeman Art Library.

And across the ocean at about the same time: an immigrant Polish family at Ellis Island, New York in 1910. There is so much one could say about this photograph (to which few novelists – except perhaps Dorothy Canfield Fisher – could have done justice) but one extraordinary thing is that on the long voyage over none of the boys apparently lost their hats! Here is a video about newly arrived immigrants.

Two or three decades earlier and life in the raw – an impoverished London family © Museum of London.

So we plan to continue on the theme of old photographs. This is one of the photos that Lisa of the wonderful blog A Bloomsbury Life found inside 'one of the four cracked leather albums I bought at a flea market in London years ago'. It has the same quality of the camera shutter just having been pressed and no formal posing. You can almost hear the giggling.

Eavesdropping is the only word that comes to mind when one looks at this 1915 photograph of the thirty-year-old Duncan Grant, with Lytton Strachey next to him and beyond that Ottoline Morrell: there is something incredibly immediate about the photograph, as if we were behind the camera, and the details are so vivid eg the kettle raised up on a trivet © National Portrait Gallery.