I'd intended, when I made my list of things to do this year, to have a look at some online second-hand book sellers like Abe Books, Alibris, and assorted marketplaces, and to pick out something from the booklist to buy. However, in the event I didn't need to, as this year on our holiday we were staying near Bookbarn International on the Somerset/Avon border, a big book warehouse with a wonderful cafe, which we ended up visiting three times over the course of the week. Everything on the shelves is £1, and you can search their stock catalogue for rarer and more expensive books. For once our carrier bag full of books included several from our booklist.
So what did I get? I'd love to be able to introduce a more academic tone to this blog and say I found the collection of Ibsen's early plays for which I've been hunting for ages. But what I actually got was ...
... Magnificat. Less intellectual but more fun, and I've been looking for that for ages too, so I'm chuffed.
I also found Irina Ratushinskaya's autobiography ...
... Grey Is The Colour Of Hope. For those who haven't heard of her, Irina Ratushinskaya is a poet who was a prisoner of conscience in the former USSR. I have some of her poetry and wanted to read her story again.
We got a couple of detective stories as well, along with several books from R's section of the booklist, and Hessayon's House Plant Expert, which wasn't on the list but was £1 and should be useful: although I really prefer my plants in the garden I'm thinking of starting to grow house plants purely for the health benefits.
Altogether it was a bookshop well worth visiting - and the cake was excellent too!
