PBOTD 5th June: H M Peel - Dido and Rogue

-
The pony books for the next few days are a bit of a tour around my bookdealing days. It's about a year now since I decided to shut up shop. I can't say I regret the decision, because the ability to earn money above the minimum wage is a massive relief I don't intend to give up. I do miss bookhunting though. I miss the excitement of tracking down a book I know a customer wants, or of finding a rarity. I don't think I will ever forget finding not one, but two copies of Primrose Cumming's Silver Snaffles on holiday in Norfolk. That was in the days before the Fidra reprint, when a decent copy with a dustjacket was a three figure book. Those Silver Snaffles paid for our holiday.


The very first books I sold were by H M Peel. I bought them from a bookshop in Oundle (now alas closed). I'd gone along to buy books for my children, seen the HM Peels - all beautiful first editions with dustjackets - but not bought them. What would I do with them, I thought. In those days I hadn't started collecting pony books. I had started collecting Monica Edwards' books, but that was it.

But those books itched at me. I woke up the next day, thinking about them, so rang the shop up to make sure they were still there (they were) and drove over and bought them. I read them all at a sitting, transported back to a time when I imagined that all I needed to live a happy horse-filled life, ever after, was the overwhelming wish to do so.

But we were then in the middle of one of our perennial crises with our expensive millstone of a house, and money needed to be made, so I decided I'd try selling the books on eBay. I knew absolutely nothing then about the rarity or otherwise of pony books - though to be fair, neither did anyone else. An American collector described to me how she'd come over to Hay on Wye in the 1980s and bought a container-load of pony books - the dealers couldn't push them her way fast enough, because they couldn't sell them.

The Americans were ahead of us in the UK, and I sold all of those books to American collectors, for sums that astonished me then. There's money in pony books, I thought. And so I started selling books.

~  0  ~



Comments

Kate Lattey said…
That's interesting that you say that about Silver Snaffles. I picked up a copy online (I think) for around $10. It's a hardcover and has a dustjacket, though it's bright orange and not an original edition. I'd never heard of it but thought I'd add it to the collection, and it's a lovely book.
19 June 2014 at 22:28
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