If this blog was a book of my life, that would be the subtitle. All the telling myself I really don’t need any more books and that the tbr will fall over soon – doesn’t work. I made the mistake of visiting the only “proper” second-hand bookshop in the nearest big town last weekend (Claude Cox) and this was Not A Good Thing!

Trouble is, my latent love of old Penguin volumes has been rekindled by apenguinaweek and as not so many of them turn up in the charity shops, I thought I’d pop into Claude Cox.

It’s a lovely old building and I haven’t actually visited for years – the last time I went, there was a separate paperback section hidden away at the back, as I suspect most of their trade is in collectible tomes. However, on this visit I discovered they’d mixed all their fiction together, and there were some lovely things to choose from….

First off, I added another couple of volumes to my Strangers and Brothers set, which I aim to get started on as soon as there are enough hours in the day. The Pamela Hansford Johnson (Mrs. Snow!) is just ‘cos it sounded good and looked nice!!

I confess to being attracted to this one by the cover as well. I’d also read about it online and thought it might be quite amusing (apparently Connolly’s only novel) so it was worth a punt for £1.

Isn’t that cover design just lovely? So 1950s! And Margery Sharp has been much mentioned on LibraryThing so how could I resist.

After the visit to Claude Cox, I thought I might as well do a trawl of the charity shops (tho’ I was already weighed down a little). The first stop brought forth these:

An Atwood I don’t have and a rather scholarly volume on Sylvia Plath – both at bargain prices.

The Oxfam Bookshop yielded a Gladys Mitchell missing from my collection so that was rather lovely too.

And finally:

a rather lovely Isabella Bird hardback volume in wonderful condition! I have most of her Virago-published books but this looked so lovely I couldn’t resist.

So the tbr is tottering ever higher and I am trying to tell myself I must start applying the one in-one out rule. Does anyone else have this problem?!