A Bluestocking Knits

There isn't a new Booking Through Thursday question this week, so I'll just make something up — here are the books I bought in England.  (Looking at the stack like this, I guess I can see why David grew alarmed as the trip went on, but this doesn't even approach that heady fortnight of my youth when I came home with no less than six volumes of Virginia Woolf's diaries and letters! — in hardcover!)

From Waterstone's in Kensington High Street, the Lucy Worsley book I've already mentioned, Jane Austen at Home.  I got distracted by some library books which of course had to be back before the due date, so I've not finished this yet, but it's no fault of Worsley's.

After having not one but two concierges at the Marriott in Regents Park stare at me in utter mystification when I asked if A to Zeds can still be had, David surprised me with a visit to Stanford's in Covent Garden.  This is a truly wonderful bookshop, possibly the place to go in London for maps and travel books.  I asked the sales clerk, and he said, "Yes, of course!" and showed me a whole shelf of that famous street atlas, which restored my faith in Britain at once.  We could all have spent hours at Stanford's — I think it's three floors, and we only visited one — I bought How to Read Castles by Malcolm Hislop, The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs by Tristan Gooley, and the spiral-bound A to Zed.

The only souvenir guidebooks we bought were for Windsor Castle, Ightham Mote, and Bodiam Castle.  Believe it or not, I was actually trying not to buy a lot of books! but I think that Ightham and Bodiam were my two favorites of the Stately-Homes/Castles we visited.

At the New Place bookshop in Stratford-upon-Avon, The Shakespeare Circle and Finding Shakespeare's New Place, the latter of which I am especially interested to read, of course being fascinated with Elizabethan houses, not even counting the Shakespeare angle.

It has nothing at all to do with Chartwell, and I'm not really sure why there were so very many cookbooks in the shop there — maybe Churchill really liked his suppers! — but that was where I happened upon Sophie Thompson's My Family Kitchen — and at about a third of the cover price.  I adore Sophie Thompson, and I like to cook, so all three of these together were Fate.

At a narrowboat/information-center/souvenir-shop at Stratford-upon-Avon, I confess I bought a number of little how-to narrowboat books including — obviously a weakness of mine! — a cookbook.  Pork fillet and dried-apricot casserole on the first page — doesn't that sound good?!

The book shop at Sir John Soane's Museum was also a place where I could have spent hours, but the only book I came away with was At Home with the Soanes by Susan Palmer, wh. I haven't had a chance to do more than flip through to see the illustrations, but David has read it and says it's very good.

So some of these books were actually relevant to what we were doing or seeing those three weeks — the canal how-to books, obviously, and the castles book, and the Shakespeare, certainly — and some were just serendipitous finds, which I think is a happy outcome altogether!

Being a bit of a technophobe, I can't manage to subscribe to Booking Through Thursday, and so I don't know without actually going to the homepage whether a new question has been posted — so here I am thinking that there hasn't been a question since December or thereabouts, and there have been five.  So I inadvertently answered one yesterday, and here is the most recent one.

All other things (like weight, cost, and so on) being equal, what’s your favorite format for a book? Hardcover? Paperback? Old? New? First edition? Digital? Audio?

I see the appeal of each of these, to be sure.  For reasons of space, I am amassing a stash of classics on my Kindle (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, etc., as well as more modern things like the Cadfael and Miss Read series as they appear), and I really love some of my audio books (the Wendy Hiller version of All Passion Spent I mentioned yesterday, for one, the Irene Sutcliffe Pride and Prejudice for another).

First editions? not really, the exception being that I am slowly collecting D.E. Stevensons, many of which are first UK editions because for the most part those are more complete and more authentic — for some reason, her US publishers regularly lopped off whole chapters, and of course (why??) Americanized spelling and certain words us Yanks would doubtless be completely mystified by, such as "neighbour" and "lorry".  (Grrr.)  But for the most part, what is inside the book matters to me more than the imprint.

There is much beauty to be found in an old book, either the sort of universally-acknowledged beauty of morocco and gilt or simply that velvety softness that the edges of the pages get in books of a certain age.  And new books certainly have their beauties, either in some really well-done design or simply in the thought that a new world awaits just inside.

But I find that this question is really difficult to answer!  All kinds of books have their unique appeal, and for both practical and aesthetic reasons — but I suppose if I had my druthers, I would choose hardcover more often than not, though I suppose that the appeal is as much emotional as it is intellectual!  I like the heft of them, the substantiality, the sense of permanence.

I have a few more vacation posts in the works, but in the meantime here is something about reading, in lieu of a Booking Through Thursday question.

I bought Jane Austen at Home at a Waterstone's we happened to be passing when out sightseeing in London and I needed to sit down for a few minutes.  I did not know about the tempest at the time, but am enjoying the book nevertheless — Worsley writes easily and well, although she does tend to get a bit informal at times, wh. I find a bit more off-putting in print than I mind in person, certainly for books, but this is a small cavil.  I do appreciate that she is not afraid to call out the recent spate of biographical ("biographical") movies for indeed being as much invention as biography!

(If like me you did not know about it, there have been grumblings about certain parallels between Worsley's book and Paula Byrne's The Real Jane Austen.  The problem is, of course, that because there is so little known about Austen, there really aren't that many Facts with which to write a biography — and a great many of them come from the comparatively small number of surviving letters, and from now-famous quips from people like Virginia Woolf about Jane at fifteen "laughing, in her corner, at the world" — so that, obviously, it is difficult to write about Austen's life without "quoting" previous biographers.  So why write "yet another" book about Jane Austen?  Ah, the fascination is always there! and, like with Austen's novels, one must look for and appreciate the subtleties, which are certainly there.)

Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse series of murder mysteries was recommended to me by a friend — my public library had two, this Clerk's Tale and the earlier The Reeve's Tale, which I finished the other day before starting this one.  I found Reeve a bit slow getting started, rather dangerously slow in fact and I was tempted to give it up, but once the murders began (!) it certainly gained momentum.  I must admit that I hold Ellis Peters' Cadfael books as my gold-standard for mediaeval mysteries, and so far none I have found can match that, but that is something to strive for.

After visiting Sissinghurst — which is one of the things I've yet to post about, sorry — I was interested to read Portrait of a Marriage at last, though I had to go pretty far afield to find a library copy.  I must admit that my first impression of Vita, which as first impressions often do has stuck with me, is that she was a rather alarming person.  As it happens, though, little of this comes through in her writing, which is elegant and full of beauty.  Last summer I read two of her gardening books on my Kindle, and I have loved All Passion Spent for years — ever since finding an audio version read by Wendy Hiller, who also starred in the excellent television series.  I am still not far into this book — the mess is just beginning in Harold's and Vita's marriage, and I suspect I'm putting this off a bit in dismay, even though I know what happens.

There was a recording of Vita playing in one of the Tower turret-rooms at Sissinghurst, and I was surprised to hear that her voice sounded nothing at all like the picture I had of her in my head —