phaude

A mock advertisement from The Jenguin Pennings (1963) by the humorist Paul Jennings – author of the Observer’s Oddly Enough column – advertising Boddery Household Noises, a company selling recordings of everyday sounds designed to deter burglars.

Alas, I can’t make out the rest. Sorry.

Looks to me like ALBION ENGINEERING COMPANY

Ha. It’s a hell of an image…

Scanning through my feed, I briefly thought this said ‘Ethel Merman’.

“Oh! It’s Bookshop Day!” I remarked to my girlfriend this morning.
“What does that even mean?” she said. “EVERY day is bookshop day for you.” It’s a fair point. I bought only one book today. I hope others fared better than I did.

Me too.

An old advertisement for book tokens from the back of a Pelican Special, including the amusingly pseudo-egalitarian line: “However doubtful you may be about a friend’s literary taste—whether you suspect that it is on a lower plane than your own or are all too conscious that it is superior—TAKE COMFORT! You can still give a BOOK that is bound to please him—since he can choose if for himself.”

Spoils of Waugh: five hardback books, bought after a trawl through Cambridge’s many charity shops and G David (I think the only remaining second-hand bookshop). Three are Evelyn Waugh biographies (Stannard and Hastings); two are collections of letters (to/from Nancy Mitford and Lady Diana Cooper).

A very Waugh-heavy haul from the second-hand/charity shops yesterday. The biographies are upgrades and I already have a volume of his letters, but still. Dreadful man, wonderful novelist. (Although his early funny novels are of course infinitely better than late, sentimental ones.)

Anything to distract from how horrible the outside world appears to be, eh?

Magpie. Grasshopper. Whatever. I don’t have the attention span to distinguish…

This advertisement for ‘Pelmanism’ from the back pages of an old Penguin seems pertinent, utter nonsense though it obviously is.

If the phrase ‘magpie mind’ could be embodied in a single photo, I suspect this one of my bedside table could be a contender for the top ten.

Congratulations! I’ve preordered it.

The arrival of a new Nicola Barker book is always, always a cause for celebration. I bloody love her.

Writers rightly wonder whether Bluesky is a reasonable promotional platform. Ten minutes ago, I hadn’t heard of Ben Pester. Then I chanced upon him thanks to @guyware.bsky.social and read this Observer review. Now, I’ve ordered his novel.

Shentalinsky’s book The KGB’s Literary Archive – The Discovery of the Ultimate Fate of Russia’s Suppressed Writers.

Recent acquisition. Absolutely fascinating and I already want more of this sort of thing. Can anyone recommend similar titles about suppressed Russian writers? General ones rather than books about specific writers, I mean. Although specifics probably wouldn’t go amiss.

No. Penguin Twentieth Century Classics’ eau de nil spines are catnip to me the way Picador’s white spines are to you…

One for @nicholasroyle.bsky.social: an insertion in a second-hand copy of Despair by Nabokov.

What a beautiful thing. (It makes my Sceptre edition look positively lacklustre.) Thank you for sharing.

Aha. That’s it. I’ve just tried on my desktop and it works fine. (The error message was via Apple’s Safari browser on iPhone if that’s of any use to you.)

I look forward to reading it – as I do all of your books.

@cbeditions.bsky.social It might just be because it’s a pre-order, but when I click ‘Add to cart’ on the 176 Interruptions product page (www.cbeditions.com/boyle5.html) I’m taken to a PayPal error page.

(Apologies for bearing bad news but it might be something you can/would like to fix.)

What an annoying typo.

An abundance of buttercups.

Passed a load of buttercups earlier. Tried the old “why people leave buttocks lying around, I have no idea” joke (S Fry, 1992) on my children. Barely a titter. Sophisticated lot, the modern-day under-10s.

I can’t decide whether I’d rather hear Dwayne Johnson deliver the line “Hard cheese, old boy!” or T-T intone “Can you smell what Sir Cuthbert Ware-Armitage is cooking?”

An excellent book day: the wonderful Eimear McBride at the Cambridge Literary Featival and a very handsome copy of Hackenfeller’s Ape from Oxfam for only £1.99.

That looks brilliant. I’d never heard of it but have just taken out a trial subscription for my children on the strength of these two images alone. Thank you for the tip-off!

In the foreground, a copy of So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid. In the background, many, many boxes full of so many books.

The text reads: An Embarrassment of Books THOSE WHO ASPIRE to the status of cultured individuals visit bookshops with trepidation, overwhelmed by the immensity of all they have not read. They buy something that they’ve been told is good, make an unsuccessful attempt to read it, and when they have accumulated half a dozen unread books, feel so bad that they are afraid to buy more. In contrast, the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.

Some light reading having finished packing my library and Packing My Library.

The first couple of paragraphs of the first chapter made me chuckle.

And, like a fool returning to his folly, I’ll still buy it in the hope that one of the non-Melrose books will one day prove as good. Some hope, huh?

Something I do have whose authenticity I don’t doubt (the provenance is sound) is this letter from John Betjeman, which I found tucked in a book I bought a few years ago.