Rearranging My Bookshelves

I decided last night, for no apparent reason, to move Nick’s vast collection of art books to the shoddily painted (by me) craftwood shelves from the equally shaky dark-stained bookcase they’re currently on. This essentially involved moving them a metre to the left, but it’s slightly more complicated than that.

The art books are fine—they’re so huge that the books can’t doubled stacked even if I wanted to. But the other shelves are filled with results of eight years shopping at the Lifeline Book Fest, and I’m a little surprised at the things I’m coming across that, apparently, I can’t bring myself to get rid of.

I’m not sure, for example, that I really need all seven Donna Parker books. Sure, they have exciting picture boards showing full-skirted girls dancing at what I assume are sock hops, and the idea of 1950s American girlhood is always intriguing, but then I also own a copy of the journals of Sylvia Plath, so am I likely to re-read Donna Parker?

I’m also not sure that I technically need Walt Disney’s Annette Mysteries. These, I suppose, have some kitsch value (though not when crammed away out of sight on a back shelf); I mean, Annette Funicello solves mysteries!

I’m a bit annoyed, though, that I don’t seem to own Sierra Summer. I could at least have bought the entire set.

I think I’ve even got a copy of a Patty Duke book by the same author somewhere.

I’m also fairly certain that I don’t need the 1980s Nancy Drew revival: The Nancy Drew Files. I’ll resist to the utmost any attempt to remove my 1970s Nancy Drew books—they might be revisionist versions of the old 1930s and 1940s titles, but they’re the ones I grew up with—but these? Are frankly awful, unless you have a weakness for lengthy, badly written descriptions of the sartorial advantage of an oversized jumper worn over tight-legged jeans.

The one advantage of the series is that they finally realised that Ned Nickerson was a waste of space, although the fan-fiction writers over at the Sympathy for Ned community don’t agree with me.

Mind you, I’m not getting rid of my Nancy Drew/Cherry Ames slash fiction.

But for every slightly dodgy book that I probably should send back to the Lifeline sale, there are some little treasures that I’ve forgotten about.

I’ve found a lovely Collins edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems, which was hiding in plain sight. I’m not a particular fan of Longfellow, but the soft, green, suede cover of this book is a delight in and of itself.

There’s also a 1970s paperback of Tuck Everlasting, which I haven’t read. At least now I can pull it off the back of a shelf and add it to the precarious pile of books on the bedhead (I still haven’t effectively learned the lesson of seven years ago, when I must have shifted too much in my sleep and was unpleasantly woken by a hardcover copy of The Vicar of Wakefield bouncing off my forehead. Despite this, the bedhead still seems to me a sensible place to store books.)

I’ve also unearthed a lovely pile of the Mary Grant Bruce Billabong books, some of which are modern paperback reprints, but four of which are lovely 1980s hardbacks that, despite the unattractive cover art, have a solidity and weight far in excess of their size. When did they start depriving children of solid-feeling hardbacks in favour of flimsy paperbacks that all seem to have the same holographic covers?

(Speaking of holographic covers, I also located my copy of The Looking Glass Wars. Not quite a holographic cover—although my copy is unnecessarily shiny—and a disappointing book to me. It seems there’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it.)

On the plus side, there’s a copy of The Mystery of the Shining Children, one of the Jenny Dean Science Fiction Mysteries. Really, who doesn’t love a book about, according to the back cover, “a sixteen-year-old sleuth with a passion for solving some of the most extraordinary science fiction mysteries ever recorded”?

Now I just need to find the other three books in the series.

Also lurking far on a back shelf were several of the Dana Girls mysteries. Teenage girl sleuths who are also students are a private girls’ school? Two of my favourite genres in one—and if none of my girls’ school stories have shown up in this list, it’s only because they have a dedicated bookshelf and don’t get shuffled around.

And Bedknob and Broomstick. I’d completely forgotten I owned this, although four of author Mary Norton’s Borrowers books, which I’ve adored since childhood, are on one of the shelves in the hallway. And, for that matter, why only four? What happened to my copy of the fifth?

This post, I’m starting to suspect, could last forever. But there’s one final set of books that I’d forgotten and am thrilled to see again: Mary Poppins. I’m not even sure I own the original book—although I remember a copy from my childhood that must still be at my parents’ house—but I do have Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Mary Poppins Comes Back, and Mary Poppins in the Park, and that’s enough strange and slightly sad, 1930s-1940s, English urban fantasy to be starting with.