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À la Recherche des Livres Perdu...
Jul. 2nd, 2007 07:04 amWhich could be "Remembrance of Pounds past", if I'd been losing weight, or "...of Quid past", if I'd been losing money. In this case, it's some of the many books I owned when I was a kid, or at least kept on semi-permanent loan from the county library, and which I haven't seen for ages.
Sometimes it's easier than expected to find them on the Net: Country Pastimes for Boys (mentioned a couple of posts below) being a case in point, going from a spine-title briefly seen on a BBC4 documentary to a book on my own shelves in a remarkably short time, considering I last owned a copy more than 30 years ago.
Others are less easy to find – find out about, yes, but lay hands on, no: the Mr Twink series by Freda Hurt, for example. I've succeeded in collecting the entire Uncle series by J. P. Martin, and it looks like Twink is going to be just as hard to find, and just as expensive (though there seems to be at least a possibility that they'll be republished at some stage.) Here’s the thing; I just want to read them again, so have no great desire to pay through the nose or any other orifice for a collector's mint edition, but I’m sure I'm not alone in believing they wouldn't be "the same" as the books from my childhood without the original illustrations by Nina Scott Langley. Think of Uncle without Quentin Blake, or Molesworth without Ronald Searle, or even Narnia without Pauline Baynes, and you'll know what I mean.
And then there are the books which seem to have completely vanished, so much so that I sometimes wonder if I didn't just dream them. Did anyone besides me read something called The Last of the Piskies? (I can’t recall the author's name – if I could it might make life easier! – but I do remember that the description of Spriggans as a hideous sort of giant maggot gave me the creeps for nights afterwards.)
There was also a book so thoroughly lost in the mists of time that I can't even remember the title, never mind the author. It might have been The Wishing Mirror, or then again it might not. I do know that one of the chapters (the book was a linked series of adventures within the framing device of what happened when the possibly-titular mirror did its stuff) was called, or featured a creature rejoicing in the name of, The Marvellous Gizawak. This creature was, if I remember, a furry purplish quadruped with a short-ish elephantine trunk...
If I was dreaming all this stuff, I was certainly getting good value for money, but I think it was more real than that. Was it...?
Sometimes it's easier than expected to find them on the Net: Country Pastimes for Boys (mentioned a couple of posts below) being a case in point, going from a spine-title briefly seen on a BBC4 documentary to a book on my own shelves in a remarkably short time, considering I last owned a copy more than 30 years ago.
Others are less easy to find – find out about, yes, but lay hands on, no: the Mr Twink series by Freda Hurt, for example. I've succeeded in collecting the entire Uncle series by J. P. Martin, and it looks like Twink is going to be just as hard to find, and just as expensive (though there seems to be at least a possibility that they'll be republished at some stage.) Here’s the thing; I just want to read them again, so have no great desire to pay through the nose or any other orifice for a collector's mint edition, but I’m sure I'm not alone in believing they wouldn't be "the same" as the books from my childhood without the original illustrations by Nina Scott Langley. Think of Uncle without Quentin Blake, or Molesworth without Ronald Searle, or even Narnia without Pauline Baynes, and you'll know what I mean.
And then there are the books which seem to have completely vanished, so much so that I sometimes wonder if I didn't just dream them. Did anyone besides me read something called The Last of the Piskies? (I can’t recall the author's name – if I could it might make life easier! – but I do remember that the description of Spriggans as a hideous sort of giant maggot gave me the creeps for nights afterwards.)
There was also a book so thoroughly lost in the mists of time that I can't even remember the title, never mind the author. It might have been The Wishing Mirror, or then again it might not. I do know that one of the chapters (the book was a linked series of adventures within the framing device of what happened when the possibly-titular mirror did its stuff) was called, or featured a creature rejoicing in the name of, The Marvellous Gizawak. This creature was, if I remember, a furry purplish quadruped with a short-ish elephantine trunk...
If I was dreaming all this stuff, I was certainly getting good value for money, but I think it was more real than that. Was it...?
