Tuesday 16 June 2015

The Bookshelves of the Two-Year-Old Daughter of a Chronic Book Collector

Speaking of Edie, as I was last week, I thought it might be instructive to see what the bookshelves of the two-year-old daughter of an inveterate book collector look like. A bit like this, in fact:


Those are the shelves in the alcove in Edie's bedroom. Quite a lot of books crammed in there; mostly picture books; mostly, but not exclusively, foraged from the charity shops of Lewes and, occasionally, Brighton. Favourites – both Edie's and mine and Rachel's – among that little lot include Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali's Jemmy Button (subtitle The Boy That Darwin Returned Home, Templar, 2013); Heapy & Heap's Very Little Red Riding Hood (David Fickling, 2013); Helen Ward's Wonderful Life (Templar, 2007); and Jason Hook and Ilaria Demonti's Wendy and the Wallpaper Cat (V&A, 2015; more on that one soon). Also firm favourites with Edie are Tony Millionaire's Little and Large (2005) and That Darn Yarn (both Dark Horse, 2005), which are on the top shelf; those actually come from my collection of Millionaire's various Sock Money works, but after reading them to Edie it became evident they really belonged on her shelves, and now she asks for "Sock Monkey" on a regular basis.


At the bottom of the alcove are more books, and yet more in a little bookcase next to it. Favourites among that lot include the Little Miss and Mr. Men box sets (the latter with Anna out of Frozen sitting atop it) and Judith Kerr's Bedtime Tales set, especially The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat. And there are other entries in the Mog series scattered throughout Edie's book collection, including here:


A shelving unit downstairs in the lounge which originally housed some of my records but now houses rather fewer of my records and rather more of Edie's books and toys. Still, I only have myself to blame there...

5 comments:

  1. Our kids shelves looked like that. We used to go to used book sales and load up. Today both are great readers still.

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  2. A girl can't have too many books

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  3. A fantastic place for childrens books is "Books For Free" - if they have any branches near you.

    You can also pick up a dust jacketed treasure for grown ups from time to time.

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  4. Already a fine collector, and it's a great pleasure to be among the collection.

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  5. We had huge amounts of children's books when my son was growing up, although when he was that age we lived in a tiny rustic apartment and I cannot imagine where we kept them. We bought used books from any source we could find and visited the library. We had a friend who worked at a used bookstore and saved recommended books for us, and that is how we got one of the Eloise books we have.

    We started collecting children's books and still have a large shelf of illustrated books that we cannot part with.

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