Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

By which I mean physically repellent, rather than the content: a subject for a whole new blog post. Bookdealers come across some rare delights in their efforts to find stock.  I suppose that's true of dealers in secondhand anything, though I'm glad my days of doing NCT Nearly New sales, and finding baby clothes for sale with the baby sick still on them, are now past.   (I used to run these, and we instituted a ruthlessly efficient quality control system to root out this wickedness...) I also used to sort books for a local Cancer Research shop, and never ceased to be amazed by what people thought we could sell:  colouring books already coloured in; books with half the pages missing; books which had obviously been in the bath; books which had spent a long time in a dusty attic, and my particular favourites, books which had spent some time in a damp garden shed.  There is nothing like sorting through a box of slightly damp, mould ridden and reeking books, to cheer y...

The thing with reading classic literature, particularly if you've seen a lot of BBC adaptations (and I have), is that the characters become wedded to their period dress and their distant period world.   Wuthering Heights  I had to read for A level, and I can't even write the words without dark, lowering moors and a lot of swishing, probably sodden and muddy, fabric, coming to mind.  Some of that might be an over-familiarity with Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights,  mind. I didn't have a huge amount of sympathy for Heathcliff and Cathy even in my surly teenage years, thinking whatever the 1970s equivalent of "What are they ON?" would have been. I know we were supposed to find Nellie Dean the housekeeper narrator the dull antithesis of all that wild and romantic emotion but I had a sneaking sympathy for her. What I liked about the book was the moors: if you regard Cathy and Heathcliff as an extension of the moors, they're just about bearable, but as human bein...

Hodder and Stoughton have done a glam re-issue of Mary Stewart's books (at last).  I like these.  They're the right side of glamorous, without being annoyingly and self-consciously "vintage".  All Stewart's heroines had  those tiny waists, as well of course as oodles of inner strength and resourcefulness. And for those wondering if I can go a whole entire blog post without mentioning the horse, she did of course write the Lipizzaner adventure Airs Above the Ground . If you fancy winning the title of your choice from the re-issues (and I do) go on over to the Brown Paper blog , where you can enter a giveaway to win the Mary Stewart of your choice.  I've gone for The Crystal Cave, which I can remember getting out of the library and lugging to school.  

With the proliferation of e-books, it is perhaps no surprise that illegal use would pop up sooner or later . Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, and many others, probably has the right idea in keeping her books firmly in the traditional format .

The full shortlist is here :  included is the excellent The Bride's Farewell, by Meg Rossoff, which has been in the to be reviewed pile longer than I care to think about.  It is a fantastic read.

New readers might wonder why I have the little box warning off the self-published.   This review and book are absolutely nothing to do with me, but the whole thing's a classic example of how not to respond to a review.

Have a look here . From Tall Stories Books via Twitter.

Try this .

Inspired by this video, I am training my stock.  I can see a musical effort at Olympia beckoning.   Alas the KP Perfect Pony collection will not co-operate because of my refusal to allow each book to wear a hand-built Swarovski bookmark, but the rest are coming along very nicely, very nicely indeed.

I think the number of times I post is often directly related to how much I am putting off what I know I should be doing.  So, with that in mind, if there are any other fellow Antonia Forest fans out there, here is a link to some fanfic .  I am now going to be good and get back to what I should be doing.  If anyone has read any and has a favourite, please do say in the comments and I can then cut out at least one layer of prevarication (if prevarication has layers, which I think for the sake of argument I shall say it does) by going straight to your recommendations.  There.  That's been another 5 minutes.  Back to the grindstone.

The British Library is under threat as never before.  Our local village library is under threat of closure, along with seven others in the county.  The council's aim seems to be to concentrate resources in the towns, and assume that most village inhabitants will be able to get to towns if they want to visit libraries.  When this is allied with the prospective complete cut in the council's subsidy for rural buses , one wonders.   Tomorrow, February 5th is Library Read-in Day.   Voices for the Library  has details of events in many libraries . Irchester Library is holding its own read in from 11.00am until 1.00pm.  If you're in any way local, it would be great to see you there.  Other local libraries supporting the Read-in are Roade and St James.

Cataloguing away busily, I checked the price on one of my books.  Up came something else I don't actually have in stock at the moment:   Riding with Reka , by Heather, now safely out of copyright, and therefore grist to the mill of the Print on Demand merchants.  You are asked to cough up a minimum of £20 for this title on Abe, and one seller, whose honesty I suppose is admirable, says in their description: This book may have imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process but they're still going to sell it, imperfections and all.   Obviously no one at any part of the process cares enough to check what's produced.

One of my talents (well, perhaps not a talent, more a skill in that it's something I've had to learn from the way life has gone) is fitting in bookshelves to places you might not have thought a bookshelf would go.  We've had lurking in the wreck-that-is-the-cowbyre, in the bit that's just about roofed, a couple of bookcases, while we waited for inspiration to strike about where we could put them.  Having evicted a couple of boxes full of stuff, and a load of pictures which should be hanging on the landing walls, and might well be again if we ever get round to finishing painting the landing, a task which has been ongoing for about 2 years, there was just enough space for this: which is now my work in progress bookshelf, for review copies, stuff waiting to go on the website and stuff I am plundering for the blog. We have another, larger, bookcase still waiting to come in.  After we've returned a coffee table to my sister (not sure why we still have it), moved ...

American publisher Dorchester Publishing Inc is pulling out of publishing physical books altogether , and concentrating entirely on POD and e-books. What do you think? Does a future exist where the Reader's Digest Condensed Edition will become a sought after rarity, salivated over on Antiques Roadshow?

Well, not quite - that was apparently March 4th. The Times today have a voucher for World Book Day , which you can use to buy a book for yourself, and another to give away. To support this, they have a feature in which they've asked various of the great and good what book they'd buy, and what they'd give away . I always have a brimming list of books I'd like to buy, but top at the moment is Horses and Soldiers: a Collection of Pictures Painted by the late Gilbert Holiday, edited by Lyndon Holden, and published privately by Gale & Polden of Aldershot in 1938. Sporting artist Gilbert Holiday died at the age of 58, having spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair after a hunting accident. His works are not as readily accessible as those of his contemporaries, such as Lionel Edwards: he illustrated relatively few books and many of his works were commissioned by the military. Neither did he issue many prints. As I don't have a copy of the great work, I can...

Some fascinating research here on Jane Austen's first appearance in print.

Book memories meme The following meme comes from the Ibooknet blog . The book that’s been on your shelves the longest. A bit difficult, this. As with most people, I guess this would have to be a childhood book. The one I've had the longest would either by my extremely battered Winnie the Pooh paperback, or my slightly less battered but still not good Wind in the Willows, both of which were read to me by my mother. A book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time). Well, most of them do, really, even ones I've bought on to sell remind me of where I bought them. Hmmm. There is something that reminds me very specifically of a time in my life, and that is "Jane Hankey" scrawled across the title page, as that was my name when I was married first. I used to spend a lot of time either in Mowbrays (which at that time was north of Oxford St and not amalgamated with Hatchards as it is now) and was one of my lunchtime haunts, or in W ...

You too can have the smell of books ..... I'm very sad that they don't have Horse Scents, as of course the true horse lover wants their scent straight, not undercut with violets and pot pourri , but I'm sure it's only a matter of time, as long as they can solve the production problems that seem to have mysteriously arisen .....

Read my post on the ibooknet blog to find out which books we like to pretend we've read.

Read my post on the Ibooknet blog and just pray it doesn't happen here.