The Aardvark Blog

On tenterhooks with V I Warshawski
10/01/2014

There is no more exquisite pleasure/pain for a detective story lover, than to be forced to stop reading with 50 pages to go. This morning I have tried readng in the bath, and balancing toast , book and Lapsang, but I still have a good stub of pages left. Sara Paretsky is an author who I always recommend to customers, and as ever we have a few of them in stock, although not unfortunately Firesale which I think is her masterpiece.

Back in the bookery the waters have gone down and customers can now reach us without going through biblical floods. We have been heads down processing the books of Professor Joan Rees that I bought at the beginning of the week. Already some of them have started to sell and two interesting volumes on Spenser are winging their way to an American academic. Much more to work through including some interesting old travel guides, more texts, poetry and plays, and even some signed books. Yesterday we put on a couple of dedication copies of F R Leavis boooks. This lead to a bit of a disagreement with Stephen the book as to whether any-one still cared about Leavis or even read his books. For myself I still find him an interesting critic, although one has to acknowledge that his impact on the English faculty at Cambridge, was as destructive as J L Austin's affect on the Philosophy faculty at Oxford.

Most interesting are often the books of texts which one has never come across. As I write this I am looking at a copy in bound typed MS of the Roman de La Rose a medieval French fable of which the only MS is in the Vatican Library. Having such books is one of the things that makes Aardvark such a distinctive bookshop, and I hope that this year's buying will bring many more such gems into the shop.