Ridgeway XIX: To the bookstores!

By -

We saw Kim off at the Tube station after a breakfast at Pret a Manger.  We'd decided to have a booky kind of day.  First, though, we decided to explore the Waitrose shopping complex we'd discovered the day before (because it houses Skoob Books, so we'd scoped it out on the way home).  Waitrose is awesome and we bought a lot of chocolate to take home, and a couple of croissants to make breakfast more exciting.  We went back to the hotel room to dump the chocolate and set out again, off to the British Library, which we thought opened at ten.  It's not far at all and we had a nice walk up to St Pancras station and the Library.  The doors were already open and we went in, but it turned out that the exhibits of library treasures didn't open until after lunch.  So we said hello to the King's Library, and went into the shop and bought more books than we intended to.  This turned out to be a theme of the day....


Will look familiar to Blake fans

The heart of the British Library:
the King's Library

You can use these, you just have to become a reader

Mom wanted to take the books back to the hotel, so she did that but I peeled off near the end and just went right to Skoob, a large used bookstore. That was pretty glorious, though to my library-booksale-contaminated mind, the prices were kind of high.  British used bookstores now have special sections for different colors of old Penguins, since everyone wants to collect those now.  I saw Penguins in horrible condition going for 2 or 3 pounds.  Nice ones are over 5.




After dropping THOSE books off at the hotel, we walked back to the British Library and saw the exhibit.  Lots of lovely treasures, Chaucer and Shakespeare Folios and the manuscript for the Monty Python 'trouble at t'mill/Spanish Inquisition' sketch.  A whole section of scriptures from various religious traditions.  And a case for the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko, to remind us that Ukraine needs support.  

Shevchenko exhibit

The free paper you see on the Tube has some great news stories

Spotted another labyrinth tile!

After that, we got pizza at a place across the street and went over to the V&A to see the Martha Edlin casket, some opus anglicanum, a screen showing the Apocalypse that Mom likes because of the cheerful little Agnus Dei, not to mention the dragons, and so on.  We dropped in at a needlework shop but it was all about hand-painted needlepoint patterns.  I would have gotten a needleminder but they were 18.50, a lunatic amount.

Martha was only 11 or 12 when she embroidered this casket.
She was an extremely accomplished needlewoman!

Opus Anglicanum, a medieval embroidery
technique using silk thread and split stitch

A cheerful little Agnus Dei

We got back on the Tube and went to Leicester Square, and walked up Charing Cross Road to find Foyles.  Oh man.  That place is enormous, and amazing.  I consider that we showed great restraint in taking lots of photos and only buying 3 books each.  Then we stopped in at a used bookstore (beautiful first editions and rarities) and another one (ordinary, nice but nothing we wanted), and went home and got some dinner at Nando's -- super yummy.  And then it was back to our hotel for our last night and an early trip home!


Any bookstore with a pseudo-archaeology section is a friend of mine

Comments

  1. LoryAugust 4, 2024 at 10:48 AM

    The pilgrimage to the British Library was a highlight of my own trip years ago! Hope you could lug all those books home without undue trouble.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanAugust 6, 2024 at 6:28 PM

      We had a trick up our sleeve. We were only allowed to have one suitcase for the hiking part, but a friend of mine loaned me a duffel bag that folded down into a little pocket. When it was time to go home, we filled it full of stuff and used it as a carry-on.Ta-daa! Extra room for books!

      Delete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

CC Spin #36: Rob Roy

By -
Image
 Success!  I had a little trouble with this one, because I was trying to read it on my phone, and that was just not working very well.  I was less than halfway through and March was looming, but a nice Penguin copy came across the donation table and I took it home.  After that, it was easy to read 50 pages a day and zoom through... Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott When I read The Heart of Mid-Lothian , I was surprised that it wasn't about Jacobites adventuring all over the highlands, but that turns out to be Rob Roy.  Honestly I preferred Jeanie Deans, but this was quite fun.  I can see why stay-at-home English folks of the mid 1800s loved reading this! It's 1715, and our narrator is Frank Osbaldistone, whose father is a London businessman.  Young Frank prefers art and poetry to accounting (and doesn't quite see why he should work hard when his dad has plenty of money), and his exasperated dad sends him off to cousins in Northumberland, pointing out that he who does not work do
Read more