Some recent finds from the front line of secondhand-book obsession. Yes they are all blue and white. I don’t know what to tell you. I promise I don’t only buy books for their colours/covers… most of the time.
An Anglo-Saxon Reader is slightly jaw-dropping, because it was compiled during the First World War and all of the people involved were in some way touched by conflict, and one of them died. Bernard Pitt, killed while serving in the army in France, was apparently particularly fond of the text ‘Paulinus and his vegetables’.
But still the book was pushed through to publication, because nothing lifts the spirits of a war-stricken British public better than a nice, thorough, well-referenced edition of selected works from the Anglo-Saxon corpus.
I studied Old English at university and keep meaning to go back and refresh it (or, truthfully, to learn some of it properly for the first time). I’ve been looking back at my favourite poems: Deor, The Seafarer, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Ruin, The Wife’s Lament. They are great.
(this postcard was tucked inside the book when I got it. was someone meaning to write home from Spain while they were enjoying a nice juicy re-read of Deor, way back when? who knows)
it came with annotations.
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