PBOTD 16th June: Veronica Westlake - The Intruders

-
I suppose there must be some booksellers who don't actually collect books: who do it because they've found a business model that works, but the thing they're selling happens to be books rather than super-widgets. I was not one of them. I am a collector, and one of the most tantalising things about selling books on your specialist subject is that you can't keep all those delicious books that you don't actually have in your personal collection. People often said to me "I don't know how you can - I'd want to keep them all."

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954, illus Sheila Rose

I've always found that the need to pay the bills concentrates the mind wonderfully when it comes to deciding what to sell (the answer is, pretty well everything). And I have quite a few  books anyway, so if a paperback copy comes in of something that I already have a lovely first of, I'm not going to mourn its passing. There are other books I don't collect - generally American authors, because there are thousands of them, literally, and that would be a slippery slope so profound it's best not thought about. One American collector I know has a collection which has taken over an entire floor of her house. I have a not particularly huge Victorian townhouse, and it's not up to entire floors of books.

But then again, there are books that I really, really want, and I would allow myself the occasional pick of the books I'd bought. How much would depend on how the business was going. If my cash flow stunk, I sold everything. Food shops are generally unimaginative, and not prepared to swap your weekly food supplies for a pristine dustjacketed copy of Jill's Gymkhana. 

 Every now and then though, the financial horizon was a bit more sunny, and then I'd pick a couple of books from stock. I did do this at Christmas too - I'd pick a book I had my eye on, and if it hadn't sold by Christmas Day, it was mine.

One book that never, ever turned up was today's PBOTD - Veronica Westlake's The Intruders. It's probably the rarest of her books, and in ten years of bookselling, I never saw one. In the end, I bought one by the conventional route. It's fair to say it's not the best of her books, and it wasn't ever going to dislodge her The Ten Pound Pony in my heart, but now I have all the pony books she wrote, and I am content.

~  0  ~

More on Veronica Westlake

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rollkur and the blue tongue

-
I've been meaning to write about this all week, but reading the exclusive in Horse and Hound about the controversy tipped me over the edge. For my non-horsy readers, rollkur is a training/warming up technique used by some dressage riders. It basically involves riding the horse with its jaw pulled in virtually to its chest, in order to increase suppleness. Patrik Kittel , a Swedish competitor in Odense was videoed riding his horse in this way. If you watch the video , you'll see the horse's tongue hanging out - blue. It takes a while before the rider notices this. When he does, he stops, puts the horse's tongue back in, and carries on. There are two things which bother me about this. Firstly, I am fully aware large sections of the dressage world, and some of its brighest stars, consider rollkur perfectly ok, but the FEI guidelines state this practice should only be for short periods, allowing the horse to rest. Patrick Kittel apparently rode the horse for two hou
Read more

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more