Tag: birthday

Happy birthday to me!

The Upside of Unrequited and Leah on the Offbeat were presents from @lefaym. Carry On, Autoboyography and The Edge of the Abyss were from mum (bought by me as second hand and remainders). And the last eight Classic Library books were my present to myself. Low res picks because my laptop has died against and the tablet has a terrible camera.

When I was about ten, Mum bought me the eight books in the first picture, a couple at a time, from Kmart, until I had them all. I’m pretty sure they were $5 a book, which might sound like a lot for a kid, but Mum and Grandma had been buying me things like Kipling and Bronte since I was about eight, and they knew I took care of my books. They’re nice editions, unabridged, with eight full colour plates of illustrations in each. Even after the better part of thirty years, the pages are still bright white, so for cheap hardbacks, they used REALLY low acid paper for circa 1990. They’re also a proper sewn binding, not just glue.

Fast foward twenty five years. I find a book, in a charity shop, that matches my books. But it is one I do not own. It is one I never knew existed. I had always had weird recurring dreams of finding more books to match my treasured set of eight. TURNS OUT THEY WERE TRUE. Cue an internet trawling, which yielded a final number of twenty four titles in the series.
Over the last year or so, I’ve found three in charity shops and bought five from the internet. I have a massive list of things I want to buy – most of them books – but I decided that what I really wanted for my birthday this year was to complete the set. So here it is.

They’re all imperfect in some way – scratches, dents, the odd ex-owner’s name, and two badly faded spines, but the whole collection is together, after twenty six years of being incomplete.

Alice in Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
What Katy Did Next – Susan Coolidge
What Katy Did – Susan Coolidge
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol & Cricket on the Hearth – Charles Dickens
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
What Katy Did at School – Susan Coolidge
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
The Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
Moonfleet – John Meade Falkner
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne
Around The World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
Heidi – Johanna Spyri
The Water Babies – Charles Kingsley
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde & The Beach of Falsea – Robert Louis Stevenson
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

Some of them I’ve read lots of times over the years, some, not since I was a kid, and a small amount are completely new to me despite being classics. I can’t wait to dive in.

I LOVE CLASSIC LIT.

The rest of my birthday present was three queer YA titles, but I’ll take a picture of those later, when I’ve covered them. 🙂