Gosh, July has been busy. I spent a week up in the Lake District with work, and I’m just off on holiday for a week shortly – unusually for me, since I usually only take holidays during the cheap, unpopular winter months. While I was up in the Lake District, I did the 1.5 hour round trip to Bookcase in Carlisle.
People often talk to me about Barter Books in Alnwick, and they are much-loved. For my money, though, Bookcase is a far superior northern secondhand bookshop – albeit the other side of the country. It is rather ramshackle and doesn’t have the same polish, but it is a wonderland for true book hunters.
You enter a largeish room filled with bookcases, and it seems like a good sized bookshop. But, friends, that is just the beginning. The bookshop expands over four floors, each one a warren of rooms and corridors. There’s no real hope in knowing where you are at any one time. I just kept walking until I found a staircase. You’d never be able to see every room properly, let alone every shelf. Last time I was there, when I thought I was done, I stumbled across a room filled with thousands of paperback novels. It’s such an amazing place. And, as you can see above, they also have a lovely little cafe with a courtyard garden.
ANYWAY, having said all that, here are the books I bought. They had quite a few amazing hardback finds that I didn’t buy, simply because I’d bought them already – which is why I’ve ended up with more paperbacks than I might have expected.
Sunday by Kay Dick
An Affair of Love by Kay Dick
Solitaire by Kay Dick
I haven’t read They by Kay Dick, which everyone was raving about last year, but I do very much like her interviews with Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith. I’d also heard that her novels were quite hard to track down – and so, finding each of these for £3 or £4, I thought it was worth the gamble. I think they’re very different from the dystopian world of They, but I’m interested to discover more about her as a novelist.
Casualties by Lynne Reid Banks
Children at the Gate by Lynne Reid Banks
I’ve recently read one of Banks’ young adult novels (review coming… soon, hopefully?) and remembering how much I absolutely love her. I’ve often left her novels behind on shelves, in the theory that I should read the ones I have first – but when has that every truly stopped me? I decided not to miss the opportunity to buy these (though it’s a shame that very few of her books have ever appeared in pleasing editions).
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
When I posted the pic on Instagram, this was the title that surprised a friend. But I’ve discovered a real love for Steinbeck in his quieter, domestic-fictiony moments. When he’s not trying to write the Great American Novel, he is brilliant at gently showing small-town life. Cannery Row and Winter of Our Discontent were both wonderful, so I have high hopes for this novel – which I hadn’t heard of before.
Fear by Stefan Zweig
I’ll pick up any Pushkin Press edition of Zweig.
The New Providence by R.H. Mottram
I collect Dolphin Books whenever I stumble across them – more on that here – and this is the first one I’ve found in the wild with a dustjacket.
The First Time I… ed. Theodora Benson
Theodora Benson (whose name you might recall from writing the British Library Women Writers title Which Way?) edits a collection of different authors sharing memoirs about the first time they did various things. And the contributors really are a who’s-who of 1930s writers. In fact, why not, here’s the full list: Louis Golding, Howard Spring, William Gerhardi, Beverley Nichols, Betty Askwith, Antonia White, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Bryant, Dorea Stanhope, Hugh Kingsmill, Rose Macaulay, Prince Leopold Lowenstein-Wertheim, P.G. Wodehouse and Theodora Benson herself. Benson also illustrates with drawings of each author, and her gifts perhaps lie elsewhere.
My Sister’s Keeper by L.P. Hartley
Hartley deserves to be known for far more than The Go-Between, and I continue to add to my Hartley shelf. I hadn’t heard about this one before – have you?
Mosaic by G.B. Stern
And, finally, a Stern novel – I believe it is the third in a series starting with The Matriarch, and I have all three and haven’t read any. The bookseller could tell by a mark on the inside cover that it had been there ‘years and years’ – I wonder how many? The price wasn’t quite in shillings…
Where would you start? Anything I should leap towards?
