To those of us whose love of books is tactile – cherishing their feel, texture, smell – picking up a book with the stamp ‘Book Production War Economy Standard’ ought to come as a sharp disappointment. But Robert Gibbings’s Coming Down the Wye, published in the first year of those authorized economy standards agreed between the Publishers Association and the Ministry of Supply in January 1942, seems only lightly scathed by the official restrictions (on such things as type-to-page ratio, maximum type size and minimum words per page).