The Melbourne Haul and a Spring Day

I have been home from Melbourne for almost a week and it already seems a lifetime away.  These holidays sure get away from us.  I was making my coffee this morning before settling down to read some blog posts from others and I saw the back yard was full of fairy wrens.  A sure sign that it is spring though these little birds are around quite a bit.  They were busily eating insects.  For those of you who don't know what these birds are here is a photo of the male and the female.  He is very flashy.

I spent the weekend reorganising my Penguin Book collection.  I had a lot of non Penguin books on the shelves and I removed these in order to spread the Penguins out a bit more.  I currently have them filed on top of each other so tightly that when I'd add more to the collection I could not fit them in. So I put the non Penguins in a box and though I'm not happy they're in a couple of boxes I will try to get them read so I can either sell them or give them away to make room for the Penguins. 

I would really like the library room to just be Penguins including the various series of them.  These are the books I found in Melbourne.  They are from different series and different time frames as you can tell by their covers.

These are from the earlier series of Penguins (1940's to 1950's.

These Penguins were in the later series as you can tell from the variety of covers.

These were also from the later series and there are some humorous books in this batch.

L to R:  The Penguin music scores which have beautiful covers, Typee is from the Penguin Illustrated Classics and the
George Meredith book is one of the Penguin Hardcover copies made especially for libraries. Bigger print and hardcover.

These books are from late in the series. They number as 2000 plus and were published in the late 1960's for the most part.

These are from the children's books, The Puffin series. All are first published Puffins and I only pick them up if they are firsts and low in price.  I can't afford to collect the Puffins from book shops where they usually cost more.  I found these in Melbourne and they were reasonably priced so I picked them up because I like t heir covers so much.

I would love to know if you have read any of them as some are obscure. On a Spring day while the wrens played in the back door I was happily organising all my shelves with my new Penguins.  Little pleasures, eh?

A Penguin, An Airport and Graham Greene- 1959

Today I am sitting in the airport reading Graham Greene’s Penguin No. 2822, In Search of a Character.  It is a slight book and I am greatly enjoying it so far. It has two novels within it of two Africa Journals he keeps. I have read the first one. He is in the Congo area and he is thinking about a doctor, a character for his next book. However it is quite funny that every time he comes with an idea there is a footnote at the bottom of the page that this idea was later pitched out.  I have no idea if he ever settles on anything for certain.

He tends to visit places around the world for 3 to 4 months, he gets quite depressed until he has established a routine each day. He speaks of melancholy quite a bit. In this particular journal he is surrounded by people with leprosy.  He writes quite a bit about leprosy especially focusing on both contagious leprosy and non-contagagious leprosy. A lot of what he believed then is no longer true about the illness and that is also highlighted in the footnotes.

He also has a great deal to say about the role of the church in this country and most of it non too flattering.  He mentions a nun who is bemoaning the fact that a settlement up the river no longer has the numbers of people with leprosy anymore and says, “Oh there is almost nothing to do anymore.”  

One of the priests he spends time with shoots everything and one evening while on board a most uncomfortable boat ride the priest shoots a heron and serves it for dinner.  He doesn’t realise it isn’t rabbit until later.  He is not happy with the way the priest tends to sadistically tease cats, dogs and shoot birds.  He doesn’t think the faith and the actions mix very well.

The story is laid out like a diary beginning January 31, 1959. I guess keeping a journal that is true to events at the time is that later on medical research changes some of the facts of the time.  There are quite a lot of footnotes  but I found them quite interesting.

I felt very much like Alan Lane only in an airport and not a train station, wanting a little book that would fit in my pocket as my bags are so heavy with books. So after I checked in the bags I pulled the Penguin from my pocket and began reading this 1959 tale, trying to find a quiet place that wasn’t playing musak in order to concentrate on the story at hand.  (That is another topic altogether.)

Looking forward to getting home and unpacking all the books and putting them away.

A Book Free Day- Last Day in Melbourne

Today was a rest day. I slept late, read quite awhile today and didn't leave the hotel room until 3:00.  Last night's performance of The Last Confession with David  Suchet was above excellence. An interesting tale about the death and conspiracy of the Pope in the 1970's.  It was a fascinating tale and the acting was incredibly strong. I loved it.

The Effect

Tonight I went to a play called The Effect with Australian stars Sigrid Thornton and William McInnes. It was a story about two psychiatrists, one who works for a drug company and their research with mental health i.e. Depression and their two main subjects of their experiments. The two subjects fall in love and the ramifications of that are shown as well as Ms. Thornton's own depressive behaviour.  The young actors I thought were stronger than the two seasoned ones.  It was an interesting story but not overly memorable like The Last Confession.  I just enjoy live theatre.

I had time to kill before the theatre so I walked around the Southbank area next to the river and took photos, got something to eat from a food court and then sat down near the river and read an hour.

Once finished with the play I walked back to my hotel. By then it was dark and I got a few photos of nighttime Melbourne.  I hope you enjoy my last photos of Melbourne for awhile.

It has been a lovely week away from home and a chance to have time to myself, focus and look forward to getting home again tomorrow.

A Really Uplifting Bookish Tale for a Sunday

I'm having a Melbourne rest day so thought I would share a lovely story that took place in Hobart during the last week.

My favourite second hand book store in Hobart is one called Cracked and Spineless.  They took over the operation of this shop a year ago and it appears to be going from strength to strength.

Richard and Mike compliment each other in how they market books to the public and they seem to be doing a fine and dandy job of it.

One of their strengths is how they sell books to all ages and all walks of life. You can get the weirdest, cult loving books or you can be a died in the wool traditional who only reads the classics.

Whatever your bent is you can have a lot of fun on their Facebook page too.  The link to their Facebook page is here.  If you are on Facebook you really should like them because they have some pretty funny conversations every day and it is a great marketing tool for those, um, maybe weirder types of books.

The other day Richard put up this post and I thought, "Wow, I love this and I know anyone who reads this blog of mine will also love it. "

Here goes,

I just thought you might enjoy that little tale. With all of the world wide gloom and doom about these days I really do hang out for these small tales.   And while you're at it, be sure and check out these crazy guys at Cracked and Spineless and I might add that their classics section is really beautiful. You might not get that from this Facebook page.  A great example of how a book shop can be interactive with the whole community.

Saturday in Melbourne: Serious Penguin Hunting.

Today I found the Mother Lode. I decided it was going to be sunny and 19 degrees (68F) and I was going to have a good look around City Basement Books which is on Flinders Street across the street from the back of Flinders Street Station.  I found it yesterday but only 30 minutes before closing.

This is only about half of City Basement Books in Melbourne on Flinders Street. 

This store was absolutely amazing and only about 5 blocks from my hotel. I spent two hours in this shop finding Penguins I didn't have and because prices weren't very bad I bought everything I could find that I didn't have already.  I crawled around on the carpeted floors and scrounged through the bottom bookshelves.  I kept taking more and more Penguins to the counter for safe keeping before I dove back into the shelves again. I also found several Puffins that were first published. I only looked for first published that I didn't have because you can only keep so many Penguins in a small house without looking like one of those hoarders you see on TV.

More of City Basement Books

As I paid for them (she gave me a discount as well for about 25 of them) she told me about Book House in St Kilda.  I knew there was a second hand store in St Kilda but I didn't find it the other day and as I didn't feel that well went back to my hotel. Well, today I felt much better finally and decided to head out there again with the GPS on my phone and a tram ticket. It takes about 30 minutes to get out there with traffic so not really that bad. Then took me about 30 minutes to walk through a neighbourhood to find it. It is not near all the shops but rather tucked away in a residential neighbourhood.

This shop can be tricky to find but well worth it if you are a Penguin collector. He had other books as well.

I followed the dot on my GPS I had turned into and practised turning up one road and down another to see if my dot got nearer the dot that was the bookstore. It worked.

When I walked in I was blown away by the wall of Penguin books all filed in a particular order to form a decorative wall.  It was really beautiful to a Penguin lover but probably quite impressive even to a non Penguin lover.

The books are behind a perspex in the front and shelves are open at the back. He will sell any in the collection.

The prices were higher than I paid at City Basement store so I decided I would only look for first published Penguins with a number less than 1000.  They would be the priority and I wouldn't even look at the higher end of the series (to save heartbreak).  I found a few that were good finds including a first published Catcher in the Rye.  I have never seen one of those so I was happy.  I had to pay more for it than the others but he did discount the others so I felt I was treated fairly.

These shelves are in the room behind the wall of Penguins.

I then took the tram back to Flinders Station and walked back to the hotel.  I had to meet some friends of mine who came up for the weekend to see the play tomorrow with David Suchet, The Last Confession. We're really looking forward to it.  

From crawling on the floor in City Basement I stood up on the ladder to see the Penguins on the top shelf of Book House.

So as of tonight, 5:00 pm, I have officially stopped looking for and buying Penguin Books or any books for that matter as I did do a bit of that too. When I get home (Tuesday) I will post up the haul over a couple of posts.  I am very happy with this book buying trip and now to save up again for another........in about 5 years maybe? Like they say, "As if".