Last week I encouraged you to buy a local history book, and offered a few new ones as examples. I’ve a second selection to present this week, then I’ll get back to real history.

Finding places to buy local publications, incidentally, is not getting any easier.

The closure of some tourist information centres removes one source, and the shops in National Trust properties never seem keen on stocking local work – they are more interested in competing with Past Times for the nostalgia market.

If they start closing Waterstones shops, then we really will be in trouble.

Nevertheless, I must have found somewhere to spend my cash, because I’ve got a desk full of local items.

Graham Fisher’s Jewels on the Cut, (Sparrow Publishing, £12.50), is, as the cover describes, “an exploration of the Stourbridge Canal and the local glass industry”. This is, it has to be said, more illustration than text, but the images are particularly well chosen and presented.

It is unusual to see two subjects and two industries, as it were, covered in the same publication, but Mr Fisher has a secure foot in each, and uses the canal as a base to uncover the development of glassware in the Stourbridge area.

As such, the second half of the volume is a kind of trail through the surviving works, highlighting surviving buildings. It won’t fit in your pocket, I’m afraid, but it will prove a handy companion.

The idea requires both an introduction to the development of the canal system and to the history of Stourbridge glass, and Fisher handles both topics well. I can imagine this being a model for similar books or guides exploring a local canal from the point of view of a single industry.

Staffordshire Women: Nine Forgotten Histories, by Pam Inder and Marion Aldis, (The History Press, £12.99), is an extremely well-researched and useful book. Much time and effort has been spent in recent years putting women back into history, and though they tend to be rather compartmentalised as a result, the effort has been worthwhile.

Inder and Aldis have not selected their prey at random – there is a concerted effort to present a range of women, from the humble house-keeper to the privileged beneficiary of landed wealth.

By the by, the biographies also reflect the widely differing landscapes of Staffordshire too, from the iron-making heartland of the Black Country to the chilly hill country of the Moorlands. Those environments – along with, inevitably, class and education – served to determine the nine women’s path in life.

What’s most refreshing about this book, however, is that it does not cherry-pick famous names. By choosing the matron of an asylum, a painter, domestic servant and nail-maker, we get a real insight into how gender determined roles.

Let me also recommend Anna Seward’s Life of Erasmus Darwin, (Brewin Books, £14.95). It was in 1804, two years after his death, that Anna Seward published the first biography of her erstwhile neighbour and friend, Dr Erasmus Darwin.

Anna Seward – the so-called Swan of Lichfield – was a reputable poet in her own right and so this welcome new edition kills, as it were, two high-flying birds with the same stone.

Seward’s memoir of one of the 18th century’s greatest minds was subjected to much criticism at the time, and since, so it’s only fair that we have an up-to-date edition by which to reconsider its merits.

The admirable work of the editors – Philip Wilson, Elizabeth Dolan and Malcolm Dick – helps to place Seward’s work in its contemporary context, providing en route useful biographies of Darwin’s many friends and contemporaries.

Together with the introductory chapters on Seward and Darwin, this helps to counter-balance Seward’s highly unconventional approach to biography.

It was little wonder the critics went for her. Seward ignores almost everything that the life of a “great man” was supposed to be. Her book is scurrilous at times, if not actually libellous, and is more interested in poetry and art than in science and medicine.

Much more rounded portraits of this very rounded man have appeared since. But Seward knew the man personally and that, if nothing else, gives her opinions weight.

Finally, let me mention Deborah Cadbury’s Chocolate Wars, (Harper Press, £20), a book that has already been reviewed in the Birmingham Post.

It seems fitting that a member of the Cadbury clan should publish an envoi to a firm just at the moment ownership crossed the Atlantic.

So, you might ask, what is there to gain by yet another book on Bournville and the Cadburys? Rather a lot, as it turns out.

Firstly, by comparing the firm with the other chocolate giants of the 19th and 20th century, Deborah Cadbury is able to set this particular Quaker enterprise in its social and commercial context much more fully.

I would have liked her extensive research in the family and company archives to have been more explicitly annotated, but the narrative is clear and gripping.

And by examining the collapse of the company’s independence, and the Kraft takeover, Deborah Cadbury sets out a cautionary tale of 21st-century capitalism. It may not be entirely impartial, but it appeals to me.