Going back home to my parents always means an opportunity to look at the secondhand bookstore there (singular, as there can be only one). This weekend was a good one. I found a nice stack of comics, as well as some other neat books.
What I found were fifteen or so Douwe Dabbert strips, an old serio-comic adventure series written by Donald Duck editor Thom Roep and drawn by Piet Wijn, one of the old grand masters of Marten Toonder’s animation and comic studio. These stories were serialised in the Donald Duck weekly magazine, which always included a non-Disney strip like this, aimed at slightly older readers, in its back pages.
On top of those is a January Jones album, barely visible under the big Goscinny/Uderzo Oumpah-pah omnibus. The latter is sort of a prequel strip to Asterix only set amongst “Red Indians” in French North America. January Jones on the other hand is a retro-adventure ligne claire strip that ran in Sjors en Sjimmie in the early nineties, drawn by Eric Heuvel and written by Martin Lodewijk, one of the Netherlands best scenario writers, who also worked on the Don Lawrence Storm series, the last issues I still needed to get I also found this weekend.
Finally, on top of those there’s a Gerrit de Jager cartoon collection of the strips he did for a newspaper about the economic recession and some normal books: Jane Jacobs The Economy of Cities, David Pearce’s Occupied City and Foch: Man of Orleans by B. H. Liddel Hart.
The box behind all this is a short comics box filled with a mere fraction of the collection of floppies I still have stashed at my parents. I spent an hour on Friday digging through my longboxed and taking out some favourite series and sequences, things I knew I wanted to keep. One of these days all of them need to be moved here, or gotten rid off. The dillemma of every aging comics collector: what do I want to keep, what can I live without.
So today, right on my sisters birthday, I became an uncle again as my eldest brother became the father of a second son. That brings the total of nieces and nephews on five, three nieces, two nephews. My brother has all the boys in the family so far, with the nieces divided between my step brother (the two oldest) and my sister, whose daughter was born in January. I like being an uncle; all the pleasures of having kids and at the end you can give them back to mommy or daddy, but it is nice to see how the various parents all deal with their kids, each in their own ways.
Not much read this month, as I spent much of my spare time in playing Football Manager; the trip to Plymouth didn’t help either. I always think I’ll read more travelling than I actually do.
The Making of Europe — Robert Bartlett
This is what I was reading for most of the month, a history of Europe in the High Middle Ages, between 950 and 1350 CE, when Europe became Europe through a process of “conquest, colonisation and cultural change”, as the subtitle makes clear.
Slow River — Nicola Griffith
Nicola Griffith’s second science fiction novel was just as good as her first. A young woman was kidnapped for ransom, then left for dead on the streets of London. Yet instead of going back to her rich family, she starts a new life amongst the outcasts.
Love in Amsterdam — Nicolas Freeling
Bought this in Plymouth because Sandra liked the Van der Valk series, of which this is the first, a murder mystery told from the point of view of the man suspected of the murder.
The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror — Edith Nesbit
Supernatural mystery stories by an Edwardian writer better known for her fantasy children’s novels. I read this because Sandra loved it, one of the books she read while in hospital. Decent enough stories, but not intended to be read in quick succession.
Shitty day today, as I’ve spend most of it trying and mostly failing to assemble a flat pack bed, having had to stop and restart a couple of times thanks to dumb errors. Oh well, have to sleep on the couch for another night…
Like me, Sandra was a ferocious reader, one of the few people I’ve known who actually read more and faster than me. Where we differed was in our attitude towards books, as she was far more ruthless in discarding books than I could ever be. For example, before we moved in together she had gotten rid (unasked) of at least a third of her books, while I, well, had not. She always kept trying to limit the spread of books and bookcases through the house somewhat, even though she was aware it was largely a lost battle. Not that she disapproved of buying more books, just that we should be discerning in which books we’d actually keep.
So she might’ve been just a tiny bit disappointed if she’d seen the pile of books I’ve brought home from Plymouth. Not much, just a bit and only because she’d known our bookcases are full to overflowing already and more books won’t help there. But I can’t help it, there was just too much good stuff. What I’ve always liked about going to Plymouth was browsing the charity shops up in Mannamead, near where Sandra lived, as back then you could be certain to pick up a lot of good books for cheap. These days many of the bigger charity chains have long since discovered that it’s easier to put the good stuff up on Ebay, so there’s less gold amongst the dross, but roughly half that pile still came from charity shops anyway.
The rest all comes from one great bookshop right in the middle of the Barbican/harbour, the tourist area of Plymouth, three floors of bookshelves heaving with secondhand gems. Not all that cheap, but I know that if I lived in Plymouth full time I would’ve spent quite a lot of my disposable income there — I found a lot of books there already on my own shelves, which is always a sign of a good shop. If you’re ever in Plymouth and in need of something good to read, the Book Cupboard is your best bet.
What I found there: a pile of Giles annuals, several Nicholas Freeling van der Valk mysteries, several hard to find sf novels (Vance’s Showboat World, Ian Watson’s The Book of the River, Diane Duane’s The Door into Shadow) as well as two history books, of which The Saxon Shore: a Handbook is the most interesting, something I had to buy as I wasn’t sure I’d ever see it again. In general I would’ve liked to spent a day or so browsing the history shelves, but we had other things to do…
I got some of my pictures up from our visit to Plymouth last weekend. The picture above is the most important of the lot: that’s where my parents and I scattered part of Sandra’s ashes, into the Plymouth Sound, to become part of the ecosystem again — the only sort of reincarnation or life after death she believed in.
Her sons weren’t there, as they didn’t feel up to it yet, quite understandably. We’ve left the urn behind for safekeeping so that at a later date, when they are ready, they can scattered the rest of her ashes somewhere nice. Meanwhile a final part of Sandra’s remains will be laid to rest in our own garden, helping feed the plants she herself planted.
