Day Books is an independent publishing company, established in 1998 to publish a series of ‘great diaries from around the world’. Since then we’ve branched out to include all kinds of personal writing: biography, autobiography, and collections of letters.

We also have two other imprints: the Charlbury Press, publishing local-interest material relating to Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds, and Leo Children’s Books.

Friday 5th June 1914. At 11.30 in George Baynham's large motor - fourteen of us including the chauffeur - for Llanthony Abbey in the Black Mountains.

On the road we stop to look at the 'exhaust' whic has got a spring adrift. Up comes a very consequential Welshman and says, 'What are you doing? I thought you were going to light a fire, and if so I was going to FORBID you. Where are you going?'

I should say he ought to be muzzled; he was the most interfering poke-your-nose man I ever chanced to meet.

(From  'A Brief Jolly Change: The Diaries of Henry Peerless, 1891-1913', published by Day Books)