It's quite an odd selection, even for me.
At the back, there's one of the big Dan Dare reprint collections - The Man From Nowhere. Titan Books have been reprinting the Dare strips over the last couple of years, but I prefer the bigger Hawk Books collections. Which are hard to find, and often expensive.
Also at the back is Naval Fighters 29, a book on two models of Martin flying boat - the largest flying boats to fly in active service, in fact. I like books on planes. But only certain planes.
The large dark green book is Down the Styx by Lawrence Durrell, a signed and numbered small press novella. The interior looks absolutely gorgeous. One for the collection.
Speaking of collections, Expatria Incorporated completes my Keith Brooke collection (with the exception of the soon-to-be-published The Accord, of course), and The Sirian Experiments now means I have all five of the Canopus in Argos books. Signed first editions. I bought the other four cheap on eBay a while ago, but since Lessing was awarded the Nobel the price has shot up. If I'd waited much longer, completing the set could have proven really expensive. The other two sf books are a Stephen Baxter collection, The Hunters of Pangaea, and Stretto, the fifth and final installment in L Timmel Duchamp's excellent Marq'ssan Cycle.
Finally, there's a few poetry collections - Terence Tiller's Poems, his first collection from 1941; another Salamander collection of WWII poetry, From Oasis into Italy (I also have Return to Oasis); and a pair of anthologies compiled by Geoffrey Grigson from 1939 and 1949. New Verse: An Anthology features photographs of the contributing poets at the back - it looks a bit like a casting call for an episode of Jeeves & Wooster. And Poetry of the Present still has a reviewing slip in it - "Publication Date 28th April 1949, Price 10/6 net".
2 comments:
Ah, Ian, that's quite an eclectic bunch. It's a good thing I don't have more disposable income or we'd have to move to a larger house...or put on a library addition. I think bibliophiles will be around 'til the end of time. The e-book Readers are fine for some, but there's nothing like bringing a newly purchased book (right off the press or used and battered) up to your nose and smelling those pressed pages.
I wonder that as ebooks become more popular, older books which have not been digitised will become increasingly harder to find and increasingly rarer. It's a bit like that with CDs now - some albums are only available on vinyl. And the same is true of films: some have never been released on DVD.
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