Sunday, May 20, 2012

The Times piece (photographed)

I wrote yesterday's very quick post on my phone at Charleston, of all places, without actually having a copy of The Times myself at that point.  More on Monk's House and Charleston soon - but today I thought I'd pop up photos of my quotation in The Times for those of you who don't get copies.  I was so excited to be asked to contribute!



This is what was printed (I'd like to point out that, when I wrote it, it didn't end on a preposition!):

Simon Thomas, a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford and author of the Stuck-in-a-Book blog at Stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com, says: “For the unrepentant bibliophile, being in a charity shop is like being a kid in a sweetshop — except you don’t have to get a parent’s permission to buy far more than is good for you.
“I am always willing to brave mountains of Danielle Steels and Dan Browns, not to mention entirely arbitrary shelving systems, in the hopes of finding something special. It was in a charity shop shelved entirely by colour that I found an amusing 1950 novel by Mary Essex, Tea Is So Intoxicating. It cost me 10p, but the cheapest I have ever seen it online is £70.
“It is not only stumbling across scarce books that has been rewarding. I daresay there are plenty of copies out there of The Love-Child by Edith Olivier [a 1927 novel, reprinted in the 1980s by Virago], but I probably wouldn’t have read it if I hadn’t found it by chance in the basement of a dingy charity shop. That serendipitous purchase ended up helping to determine the topic of the doctorate I am currently studying for.”

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