Agatha

After the massive dose of Trollope reported on 12th November, I had a go with 'Daniel Deronda', which was fine but the sentences were quite long and the thoughts quite complicated and I rapidly found myself working through our small collection of Agatha Christie.

Which led me onto ebay: why not buy lots of them? And ebay did indeed have lots for sale, a lot as single books and a lot as small collections, say of uniform Fontana paperbacks. Some of these collections struck me as bveing rather dear; the collectors have clearly moved in. But then I chanced across a 37 volume opportunity published by Heron, an outfit of whom I had never heard. But by the time I have worked through 37 of the things if I want any more I can just start at the beginning again, the pleasure will be renewed indefinitely. Plus there was a directory of characters appearing in the entire oeuvre, just in case, for example, one got into an argument about which Poirot Master Plenderleith appeared in.

My ebay bidding technique was a little rusty and what I seemed to be doing was bidding in however many £1 increments was needed to cover the current top bid, up to a maximum, say M - while I thought I had just bid M. In any event, a day or so later the collection was  mine for £24 plus £30 postage. A grand total of £1.42 per volume, not that far off what one might pay in a Hook Road Arena car booter.

The 38 books were quite decently bound in red with gold trim and a gold bookmark, which will save tearing corners off of the sports page of the DT. Quite a lot of the books were bound 2 up, with two novels to the volume. Or one novel and a batch of short stories. The paper is stiff enough and the books small enough that they can be read with one hand while in bed, a useful property now that the nights are getting colder. Not so much needs to stick out. One beef would be that the gutters are a little narrow, a defect in a tightly bound book - with most modern books, particularly novels, being so bound. Another would be that the books are completely lacking in the scholarly apparatus that one would get from a fancier publisher. The volumes are not even numbered, one does not even know in what order to place them on the bookshelf. There is no flannel about the author or the circumstances of composition or publication. No explanation in footnotes of obscure terms like 'pony trap'. Just a bare date of original publication.

It is not altogether clear who Heron books are or were but the heron tab at http://www.hcbooksonline.com/ clearly knows all about these ones. A rather unusual site which seems to sell an eclectic mixture of new and old. But I do learn that the set ought to be of 41 volumes not 37, probably excluding the 'Who's Who', so from time to time we are going to come unstuck and not be able to read all about some television adaptation.

Next we had the question of book shelf space. The existing Agatha frees up maybe 6 inches but we are looking for four feet and I fairly quickly decided that I am not, any time soon, going to prune out four feet of books in favour of Agatha. There are limits. Fortunately, BH was not averse to getting a new (to us) book case so off to the QEF furniture shop in Leatherhead, where we are dissappointed. But there was a rather lonely looking Italian food fair selling rather posh lines in bread, cakes, cheese, sausage and sweets. We settled for what turned out to be some rather good bread and cheese. The cheese came from somewhere up an Italian mountain, perhaps in the Dolomites, and in the form of a round maybe a foot across and three inches deep, a hard pale yellow cows' cheese with small holes scattered around the centre of the round. Grey cloth rind.

Then this morning off to the Princess Alice Hospice furniture shop in Epsom (occupying a more or less new and rather grand premises which they have failed to find a regular tenant for) where we did our business for £25. 1970s style teak finished chip board, two shelves topped by a drawer and which now looks very well in the front bay (until recently occupied by FIL). Made to measure.

We can now spend happy months working out which volumes are missing and running them down in sale rooms - that is to say car booters, second hand book shops and ebay. Indoor and outdoor fun.