I. R.

I went book crazy yesterday and came home with 12 additions for my home library (or 'the bookcase' as I sometimes refer to it). I was given a free book for some reason at the train station (a surprisingly OK collection of short stories for 'the train traveller' - some sort of promotion) and I finally bought a copy of Fine's and Saad-Fihlo's Marx's Capital at Waterstones with a ten pound book voucher I found in a pile of old papers at home (must have been there for years). When I got back to York I stumbled across a second hand book sale (a Church fund-raiser I think) in the town hall and decided to have a quick look. I didn't expect very much from it, but amongst the Andy McNabs, there was a wonderful hoard of old cloth bound and hard back books in there - many of them priced at 50p. I could easily have spent 40 quid in there, but I limited myself to a fiver - R--- discipline. I got the full set of Trevelyan's Illustrated English Social History for £2, a biography of Kier Hardie (ILP Press, 1925), An Everyman edition of Hume's Treatise, a leather bound copy of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (not sure of the date) and a 1920s edition of Hornung's Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. I'm particularly pleased with the Raffles book for some reason - there's something oddly attractive about all that Victorian/Edwardian upper class gentleman adventurer stuff. I don't quite know what it is. I like GK Chesterton's Father Brown too, and I'm also fond of MR James' ghost stories which are founded in the same kind of leisured-class adventurer context.