Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

I took the dustjacket off the 1941 edition of Primrose Cumming's The Silver Eagle Riding School, so I could put it in a protective cover, which as you can see it was in dire need of, and lo! this was on the other side.  I've never actually seen the dustjacket for Khyberie, so this was a double treat.  What a shame it is to have to cover it up, but you can't have both sides of a bookjacket on display at once.  This isn't the only double-sided dustjacket I've found, but it's the only one I've managed to photograph.  I'm not sure whether this was strictly a wartime practice.

It's harvest time, as I realised when I emerged from my work-induced fug and took the dog for her afternoon walk.  Quite how I had missed the characteristic combine hum I do not know.  Obviously I was much more into the cataloguing than I thought.  I hoped that the contactors wouldn't have started again by the time I did  my early morning walk the next day so I'd have chance to photograph the half done bits.  If I were a really good writer, I would now be telling you why I find the half doneness so intriguing but I can't actually think of anything momentous.  On that profound note, on to the photos. Harvest time is one of the dog's best things.  For months, she has not been able to go into the crops, as I had it hammered into me by my farming relations from the time I was able to move on my own that one went ROUND the growing field, not THROUGH it.  Oh the horror when one day my sister and I, having done what we thought was a very caref...

Amazon's acquisition of The Book Depository has been submitted to Ireland's Irish Competition Authority, which has just reported back on the proposed acquisition after a three week investigation. They've cleared it, saying that the acquisition " will not lead to a substantial lessening of competition in any markets for goods or services in the state."  Full details on the decision will be released next month. The decision by the UK's equivalent body, the Office of Fair Trading, should be released by 30th August, at which point the OFT will state whether or not it will refer the takeover to the Competition Commission.   The Irish decision blows something of a cold wind over at least this bookseller, though of course it's no guarantee of what will or what will not happen.   I am not hugely convinced by the combined submission by the Publishers' Association and the Independent Publisher's Guild to the OFT, which states that Amazon acquiring...

Last week I spent the holiday money.  Business has been up and down of late (though I seemed spectacularly unaffected by the Royal Wedding - it's school holidays as does me down) so I was mulling on whether or not to invest in the business, which is still making a profit, just about, or hang on and have a couple of days away, though even this might have come to naught anyway because of other family pressures. Anyway, when the chance of new stock came up; and a lot of it at that, I took it. We will be having family days out.   New stock doesn't always come along when you want it to in my line of business: once I knew I was going to buy this, of course someone else contacted me with another large collection they thought I might be interested in.  It was mostly children's books, rather than horse, so I didn't feel as bad as I might have done at turning it down, but I felt a pang. So, off I went last week to the deepest Midlands.  Here's some pictures of what I boug...

I have a guest blogger - the wonderful Meg Rosoff (and I have a couple more guest bloggers waiting in the wings too). Meg is a prize winning author .  She's won  the  Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize  2004 for  How We Live Now, and  the CLIP Carnegie Medal in 2007 for  Just in Case.   And she likes pony books. Over to Meg... I grew up in the wrong country. I know this because there weren’t enough pony books in America. By the time I turned eleven, I’d read eighteen Black Stallion books, twelve Marguerite Henrys, Black Beauty , Taffy’s Foal, Blaze Finds the Trail , and even (though reluctantly) a bunch of vaguely horsey cowboy books -- though I was decidedly not interested in anything other than the ponies. Desperate, I moved on to The Yearling (a deer book -- what a cheat), The Red Pony (too sad even to think about), Strider by Leon Tolstoy (I think it’s fair to say that I entirely missed the communist metaphor), Dapple Grey in Andr...

Thanks to Chronicle of the Horse for this.

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...