Books & Bookshops

This is basically Victoriana, so I thought I’d share. Don’t you just love old books? The smell, the feel of the leather, the really thin pages that you have to be careful with. That’s pretty much the only reason I like the Bible: the feel of Bible pages is uniquely cool. I haven’t read that many classics in my life, although I’ve read all of George Eliot’s novels, and a few Dickens stories, but I have quite a lot of old books around the house, and I love seeing them on the shelves.

After books, it’s got to be bookshops. I love all kinds – the new shiny Waterstones and Blackwell’s, where there are so many new releases and hardbacks that I would never buy at their extortionate prices, but love to look at on the shelves; the really tiny second-hand bookshops where you can’t find anything that you came in looking for but you always leave with books you never knew you wanted; the online marketplaces like Amazon and AbeBooks where you can actually just search and it finds them for you, preferably with pictures. Good times.

I went to the most fantastic second-hand bookshop in Buxton yesterday. It is called Scrivener’s, and it is in quite a small building that somehow has five floors crammed full of millions of books. It also offers expert bookbinding and restoration, which was very cool to look at. And it specialises in Victorian Books. What could be better? This being Buxton they also had a huge collection of Gilbert  & Sullivan works, which was nice. I found a lovely leather bound copy of Daniel Deronda, which was my first and favourite Eliot (ok, I’m weird), but it was £30 so I had to restrain myself. However, I bought a tiny copy of Descartes’ Discours de la Methode, in French, since I’ll have to read it in English fairly soon anyway, and my French could do with some brushing up. I also bought a gorgeous book of Schubert songs:

Schubert Songs

I love it. I know quite a few of them anyway, but it’s such an amazing copy, and for just £15. I bought another book as well, and it should have come to £21 in total, but the shop-owner sold them to me for just£15! So I thoroughly recommend browsing this shop. The only thing that bothered me a little was the sheer disorganisation. I work part-time in a library, so having to search the entire letter section, plus the end of the previous section and the start of the next section to find a book grates a little. If they’d pay me I’d happily spend time sorting it out, because it’s really very well organised into genres and spaces, it’s just the books within them that are hopelessly out of place.

Speaking of second-hand bookshops, the best one I have ever been to is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland. It’s much, much bigger than Scrivener’s, as it’s in a building that used to be a train station. It’s all on the ground floor, but it has huge numbers of books, and dvds and videos now. A lot of collector’s items and first editions that are way out of most people’s price ranges, but they have a tier system for ordinary books, rather than pricing each individually, which can work to your advantage. I have far too many books from there.

Other than that, I’m off to Belfast for a few days tomorrow, so don’t expect more news. The cross stitch continues to grow!

Oxford Cross Stitch

Buxton & Craft

Since I have been away, my blog readership has dwindled away to nothing. Never mind, this will soon be remedied.

I have been away on a suitably Victoriana-themed trip – singing at the 17th International Gilbert & Sullivan festival in a production of Princess Ida with the Oxford University Gilbert and Sullivan Society. This was my third performance at the festival, but my first with the Oxford Society, and my first in their beautiful opera house and Buxton’s delights did not disappoint. The only difficulty for me was the lack of electricity (I was camping), internet, and readily available food. Ah well.

The rest of this short entry is to show a little bit of craft that I have been working on for a while. I have been making cross-stitches for as long as I can remember, predominantly from kits, but also a few of my own designing. My favourite one to date currently hangs framed on my wall:

Japanese Cross Stitch

Another favourite craft project is the following cushion cover:

Terry Pratchett Cushion Cover

The cross stitch was from a kit, and features members of the Unseen University from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. From left to right they are the Dean, the Librarian, the Archchancellor and the Bursar. The cushion cover part of it I made myself from first principles, which was very challenging!

Which brings us to the present day. At the moment I am working on a beautiful skyline of Oxford, where I go to university, again from a kit. I’m about half way through. I hope to keep running photos of it as I go along, so you and I can see how it progresses. Here it is at the moment:

Oxford Cross Stitch

It will eventually reach about double that width, though no taller. You can see other things I’ve made over the years at my deviantArt page.

Happy Blogging!