In the meantime I headed off to my new source of cheap books in Epsom Market, with my eye being caught by the moss illustrated on the way. On the pavement opposite our local primary school the council has erected a row of handsome wooden posts, which I hope were not illegally logged from some east Indian tropical rain forest, to deter the parents from parking on the pavement - the school having plenty of land but having been laid out in an era when primary school children generally walked to their neighbourhood school rather than being trucked in. However that is not the point at issue. The point at issue being the moss. Why do hardwood posts of this sort encourage the growth of moss at their bases, particularly on a east-west axis? The posts are in a reasonably shady bit of road but they do not in themselves make that much more shade. Do the posts collect water by some mysterious process of nocturnal condensation? Have the posts been the subject of some infantile nature project? The east-west orientation may to do with the fact that the posts may be in the sun when the sun is low in the east in the morning and low in the west in the evening, in the shade otherwise, the posts thus hiding their eastern (that illustrated) and western hinterlands from half of what little sun there is. A simpler explanation could be built around the tendency of contract cleaners to sweep along the pavement but not have the energy to go all the way around obstacles. I have inspected some concrete posts in similar positions nearby but these do not attract moss in this way at all.
On to Epsom to visit the man in the market, there several days a week for the sale of bric-à-brac and second hand books. The books are all simply priced at £1 the hardback and so far I have been tempted by three.
First, an Agatha Christie. Not unreasonable at £1 but nothing special. A late attempt to move beyond her proper milieu of country & country house crime into international crime, a move in the direction of such johnny-come-latelies as Ian Fleming, who were perhaps starting to dent her sales a bit. The two do share a certain snobbery about things.
Second a portrait of the Mississippi in old maps and pictures. A nice picture book from the US, a relatively new book from Rizzoli of New York via Random House of the same city in 2008, a book which reminds me how big the French were in North America at the beginning, before they were largely chucked out by the True Brits. I learn that one Lieutenant Zebulon Pike bought 155,000 acres of land, at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers from the Dakota in 1805. Given that the Lieutenant was travelling rather light, it would have been interesting to learn on what his title to the land rested; no digitised land registries which can be updated from one's iPhone in those days. How many beads or axe heads did it cost him? Was he allowed to pay in IOUs? But then I start to wonder whether the tale is true at all - it certainly looks a bit different from that in Wikipedia. I was also interested to see the way in which the Mississippi meandered; what they told you about meanders in geography classes really is true. It also seems, very US this, that the good citizens got fed up with the way that their property prices jumped about when the course of the river jumped about so told Uncle Sam to get in there with his Corps of Engineers and get the thing under control - at taxpayer expense of course.
Third, a rather old fashioned potted history of Florence, bound in grey cloth, a bit like a Phaidon art book, but actually published by the Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, in English some time before 1963 when it became someone's Christmas present. A book sufficiently old fashioned that all 231 photographs and maps have been stuck in, this being before the days when you could have such pictures printed directly into books and usually had to settle for having the picture pages bound in a clump in the middle of the book, rather than having a picture next to the relevant bit of text. Arranged in twenty chapters (listed at the back rather than the front, in the continental way), covering such things as the spirit of Florence, Florentine sculpture, a rest in the gardens and Brunelleschi. A nice middle sized sort of book that one could comfortably browse while planning a visit, while there or while in reminiscence mode. Well worth its £1 although I shall now have to have regard to the pressure on shelf space.
I note in passing that this was also the day for lamping up the Epsom Town Christmas Tree. No apprentice up a ladder mind you, two adults and a cherry picker taking their leisurely time about it.
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