Book Information Challenge 7- Quirks

Talk About Your Blogging Quirks - Day 7

Blogging quirks?  Me?  I guess my biggest quirk was that I review my books through my alter ego which is a black and white penguin who likes nothing better than to travel the world through books.  Although Trav (short for Travellin' --his parents came from Antarctica )  may be a character that I continually practise drawing and dressing to match his environment he is really quite strictly controlled through invisible marionette strings. So I like to tell myself.

He arrived one day in my front room when I decided I was going to begin thinking about collecting Penguin books (see my list here). I heard a little rustle one night in the front room. It was cold in there and quite dark and the dogs and I carefully tip toed in to see where the noise was coming from. Mice? Rats? oooooh yuk.   Sitting in a little orange chair with a little orange torch, legs crossed like an Indian as we used to say before it became politically incorrect, you know lotus position like, he was murmuring.  He had a funny little hat on, he always seems to wear funny little hats. Probably because they are easy to draw using a computer mouse.

He was talking about this family of Americans who were very poor and they were making their way west during the 1930's depression to California. I could see the word Steinbeck on the spine of his little book. 

background pic courtesy Vector free to use clipart

He looked up. Quietly at first then he broke into a grin. He told me I should start collecting these beautiful old battered orange Penguins. For one he had many friends in them. For another I could travel the world, learn a great deal of social history and have a good time telling the world about them. Well there are other bloggers who do that better than I do but there aren't other bloggers who love these old books more than I do. Equally maybe , but no, not more.

He looked around the room and saw a lot of other books that weren't published by Allen Lane.  He never knew there were other books published by people other than Allen Lane. I told him about some of them. He decided he wanted to step out of the Penguins a bit as he'd been living in them since 1935.  He said he felt a bit, well, um….dusty.

That seemed a long time to both of us.

We talked long into the night to decide how we might do that.  I told him I could gather the books, all the books and we could visit them together and we could write about them. You know, share our adventures with others. So that is what we started to do. We fumbled a lot. We waned a bit. We got excited, sometimes we got bored. We had to find our feet in the blogging world. There are many very good bloggers out there who write about a lot of very good things especially books.

We needed something a bit different.  I worried I'd never find anything that hadn't been done before. It was his idea actually to visit books. All books. But deep down we both wanted to keep his books alive too. We wanted to save them. Keep them out of the pulp machines and council landfill.  So that remains our number one priority. But he also wanted to visit children's books other than Puffins and he wanted some up to date non fiction besides Pelicans. He grew up on those. He knows them inside out.

So we decided to travel. Pack up a bag or a case or maybe some trunks. In case we go onboard a steamer ship.  We would dress for the occasion. Mind you when we headed to California during the depression with the Joad family we only had a few things from the old farmhouse.  That was a rough trip.

It was much more fun visiting Long Island Old Sport and riding in those beautiful cars and wearing glamorous clothes from the 1920's. The world is our oyster. We might eat oysters. We might grow oysters. We can do anything in the world because now we are accessing all the books available to us.  Yes he did tell me to start travelling through the ones I have already. So not buying books for awhile but that is only temporary.  He is better at it than I am.  I find myself begging people to give me gifts of books when a birthday comes around, though I don't want more birthdays. 

Also we will be travelling to America in November to see my family in Tennessee and California.  Of course Trav (as his friends call him) will tag along.  Will we have a moratorium on not buying books?  We are still discussing that. Trav says no more books in suitcases from overseas.  I say, "Well, we'll see about that."  We're still talking about it. We'll let you know.

Okay so back to the question.   Do I have any blogging quirks??  Hmm…. No , I don't think so.