Magical Mystery Bookshelf Tour Stage Ten: The Living Room, Small Bookcase Edition

This is one of my smallest bookcases, so this is only a brief pitstop on the tour. Although it is worth noting (continuing my current obsession with anything to do with my camera) that I kept the camera settings on Portrait this time, so rather than normalising the light, it’s keep that yellowy sunset light that’s filtering in through the living-room windows, which is rather a nice effect.

The top shelf is my beloved reference shelf:

I can’t fit all my references books on here, despite the large gap: that’s for my copy of The Oxford Concise Australian Dictionary, which, since I’ve been marking, is currently on my desk. (Ideally, I should have a dictionary on my desk permanently, but there’s no room for one. My Oxford Concise English Dictionary, however, is on my desk at work.)

But there are lovely books here, including four companions to literature: The Oxford Companion to English Literature, The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, and The Feminist Companion to Literature, which I bought for $4 at a Brisbane City Council Library book sale, and adore.

I know all this information can also be found on the Internet, but at least these books are written by recognised figures in the field.

Plus, they look impressive.

This is also the shelf where I keep my two primary go-to reference books: Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopaedia. If it isn’t in Brewer’s, then it’ll be in Benet’s, and the latter, at least, has a comprehensible indexing pattern.

(I’ve never quite recovered from the time I tried to look up a simile in Brewer’s. A student wanted to know where the phrase “as dead as a doornail” originated, so I looked up “doornail.” Plausible, right? But Brewer’s told me to “See under AS.” Who indexes similes under their conjunction? That makes no sense!)

I could spend the rest of this post raving about reference books, so I’d best restrain myself now. But I will point out that English Through The Ages is a chronological dictionary, listing words under their earliest-known use in the language (cool, huh?) and the battered-looking volume on the left is my lovely Victorian dictionary, in a crumbling leather binding.

(My parents bought that for my birthday a couple of years ago. But it was part of a job lot, so my birthday that year also brought me a dozen other books, a pair of matched, khaki-coloured flower vases (which are now in the spare room, holding up a green bob with a pirate skullcap on top of it and a baseball hat with a propeller attached to the top), and a set of brass canisters, battered but with a lovely patina. My parents are a little like that, now they’ve discovered the joy of auctions. It’s analogous to the time they bought me a gorgeous brass-bound trunk for Christmas, discovered it had three dozen items stacked inside it, and wrapped those up for Christmas, as well. One of them was a ceramic elephant. Enough said, really.)

(I keep the ceramic elephant in the living room. Next to the Dalek.)

(Ahem.)

The second shelf in that picture is almost all mid-twentieth century Everyman reprints of Victorian novelists who might have been read from the 1920s to the 1950s, but are a little hard to track down now. There’s some Charles Reade, some Clara Reeve (though she was eighteenth century) and Edward Bulwer Lytton.

I must own three dozen Lytton. I’m not sure why, but it does mean I own a copy of Paul Clifford—which I’ve just found in the study with a stuffed Snoopy figure in front of it, which would be hilarious if it had been intentional. And that means I own a copy of the worst opening sentence in English literature.

People know Paul Clifford starts “It was a dark and stormy night,” but do they know it actually gets worse from there?

It was a dark and stormy night, the rain fell in torrents except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Nice comma splice, Sir Edward. It also looks to me as though someone pointed out to him at some point that places other than London also have streets.

But leaving Lytton behind for a moment, the next shelf is yet another of the dozen or so places in the house where I keep my detective fiction:

This, at least, is the only place where I keep my Rex Stouts. I can’t explain how fabulous Stout is (with the proviso, of course, that you actually like detective fiction). And one of the great joys of my life is the fact that the Canadian adaptations were both fabulous and accurate. I know that does happen (the BBC Pride and Prejudice springs to mind, and their Vanity Fair was good, too), but it doesn’t happen often enough.

Yes, I’m looking at you, recent adaptations of Agatha Christie novels.

I’m also rather enamoured of how all the Harry Potter novels look lined up together. I also like the books (really, though, would it have hurt for the last book to have a little less whingy, rainy summer holiday and a little more of what the fabulous and lovely Neville was doing at Hogwarts?) but I’m happier when a book I enjoy also has a pretty cover.

On that note, that is the ugliest of the four or five copies of Dracula that I own.

Sadly, my verbosity is running to an end (convenient, since I still have to cook dinner), because the last shelf is mostly Nick’s books.

Iain Banks (and Iain M. Banks), Lois McMaster Bujold, Julian May, and Bruce Sterling: all are Nick’s.

That is my hardback copy of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, though—well, the original four volumes of the trilogy, anyway. I’ve been trying to forget the fifth book: so depressing. Even Adams admitted it was a bit much. But Nick tells me someone is planning on writing a sixth addition to the series; since that person obviously isn’t Adams, I have no interest in such a project.

We’re all sad that there’ll be no more Douglas Adams books, but if you bring in someone else to write them, then there still won’t be any more Douglas Adams books.

Am I being too cranky about this?

Never mind me: I’ll solace myself with my copy of “City of Death”: “What a wonderful butler! He’s so violent.”