Picture Book Monday: Alice the Fairy & 'Night, Circus

[osprey_archer]

After book-mending this afternoon, I stopped in the library library to idly inspect the new book table. An idle moment well spent: because what should I find, but Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder! Of course I snapped it right up and I've been reading it all afternoon.

This was a nice consolation prize for a frustrating session of book mending, at least half of which was spent removing an extremely recalcitrant price tag from the cover of a new book. What kind of monster attaches a price tag to a book cover so securely that you have to pick it off shred by shred with the tips of your fingernails? ("Most big chain bookstores!" the pink-haired librarian called, when I complained about the tag to my mother.)

And then I found a completely charming picture book, David Shannon's Alice the Fairy, which was far too battered to save, so I had to consign it to the discard pile. Alice is, as she puts it, a "temporary fairy": she wears a pair of costume fairy wings, and imagines herself magically shaping her world with her fairy powers. ("I transformed Daddy into a horse!" she says, accompanying an illustration of her dad pretending to be a horse while Alice rides on his back.)

I did manage to rescue Mark Corcoran's 'Night, Circus (not to be confused with Erin Morgenstern's novel The Night Circus, and I have to wonder if Corcoran has suffered at least a few pangs of envy that a book with such a similar name has achieved such heights of success). It's a picture book - mostly pictures, and very few words - about someone going around and bidding goodnight to all the circus denizens: the elephants, the clown, the strongman, the trapeze artists. The soft, dark illustrations are rich and lovely.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Yay, The Golden Age of Murder! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, or maybe even MORE (I kept getting distracted by typos and weirdly forced wordplay). I'll be interested to hear your thoughts, especially since I'm not completely sure what mine are (beyond "must buy a paperback version; this hardcover is enormous")

Oh God, those chain bookstore tags are the WORST. Borders, rest its dust-jacket-defacing soul, was especially bad, but they are nearly all terrible. Has it occurred to you that someone might want to remove this giant price sticker at some point, Borders?

In Used Book Land, we also get lots of library discards, many of which are in relatively decent condition except that someone has stamped DISCARD all over the cover, title page, table of contents, first page, back page, and several additional random pages within the book. One of the local libraries was particularly scorched-earth about it in what looks like the 80s-early 90s. Why? I don't know.

I've been meaning to ask you -- do you know of any good resources for learning how to mend books? I've got some books I'd like to be able to restore. Books are better than video for me, but anything will do. If not, no worries!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I'm about halfway through! I'm enjoying it so far, although I think the book might be a bit tighter if Edwards didn't feel compelled to include a section about every single Detection Club member and focused more tightly on Sayers, Christie, Chesterton, and maybe a couple of the others.

Also, the fact that the early Detection Club minutes disappeared during World War II is a tragedy that has clearly robbed us of glorious accounts of Detection Club meetings, and I am in mourning. I hope it's discovered buried in an archive somewhere, but really I suspect it burned up in the Blitz.

I've actually bought a few library discards myself over the years, and of course it's nice to have the books...but it is a bummer to have DISCARD stamped all over it. Couldn't they find a single discreet place to stamp it and leave it at that?

I've learned my book-mending skills entirely through apprenticeship, sorry. And I haven't worked on anything really old - I think the oldest book I've worked on was from the sixties, and most of them are more recent - so I'd be leery to offer advice for anything older than that.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

That's ok! I'll check the library or something.

I have mixed feelings about Edwards' inclusiveness! I liked the Sayers-Christie-Berkeley core and thought the book as a whole was overstuffed to the point of being hard to follow, but I liked nearly all of the author profiles and anecdotes individually, so I sympathize with the unwillingness to cut. And I wonder if the problem isn't inclusiveness per se, but some kind of structural weakness -- I don't know; I kept feeling like the book needed another round or two of revision. It's very good, but maybe not quite finished.

Then again, this might be a problem I'm overstating in retrospect. It definitely didn't stop TGAoM from being enjoyable.

I hope it's discovered buried in an archive somewhere, but really I suspect it burned up in the Blitz.

PROBABLY. :( I mean, you never know? The world is still full of neglected trunks with stuff piled on top of them, and stranger things have happened. But it's also very, very easy for paper to burn, especially if some asshole decides to set your city on fire.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It does seem disorganized. It's vaguely chronological, but there's still a sense that the order is more or less random, which weakens the book even though all the individual bits are good.

But it is awfully compelling. I meant to get some writing done this morning, either on my novel or Christmas cards, but I couldn't resist the lure of the book.