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🎁🎅🎄MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR!☃️❄️🦌
🎁🎅🎄MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR!☃️❄️🦌
With restrictions finally beginning to relax, the end of lockdown is hopefully in sight. In the meantime, allow our staff picks for this month to transport you to exciting and strange new places. Escape to both grown-up and childhood literary worlds where the challenges of life under lockdown are left far behind. No tickets or passports are required for these journeys – join us in the infinite possibilities between the pages of a well-chosen book...
‘..curiouser and curiouser..’
“..It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before..”
Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story wasA Study in Scarlet(1887)followed byThe Sign of Four(1890), but the popularity of the famous detective really began with the series of short stories he contributed to The Stand Magazine from 1891 - collected asThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes andThe Memories of Sherlock Holmes.Doyle’s attempts to kill off his creation were unsuccessful (he wanted to focus on his other work), and Holmes reappeared inThe Hound of the Baskervilles.
Join Holmes and Watson on Cornwall’s bleak and foreboding Dartmoor as they solve the violent death of Sir Charles Baskerville. The story was so successful that Sherlock lived to solve many more cases, finally hanging up his deer-stalker hat in 1927. Country House Library holds a comprehensive stock of many of the above mentioned works by this prolific English author. Take a walk down Baker Street and experience some “elementary” literary escapism with arguably the world’s greatest ever detective!
Shop vintage Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“Death was an executioner, lopping a flower before it bloomed”
A classic of the ‘double identity’ genre,The Scapegoatis a story told by the narrator John, who’s lonely, miserable and wants to be French.He meets his double, Jean de Gue, a French count, in a railway station bar in Le Mans, and (without giving too much away) changes places with him. He knows nothing about de Gue’s family or circumstances or life and has to improvise.
The story takes place over one very intense week, in which everything changes. John is suddenly thrust into the life he has always wished for - having a family, being French, having responsibilities, belonging to people and a place. The details are wonderful - daily life, the house and food, and the characters of Jean’s family, all of whom have secrets. This is a book about getting what you want and coping with it, about identity, about belonging. Perhaps best known for her novels Jamaica Inn(1936) andRebecca (1938), this fascinating work by Du Maurier is also a rare commentary on the post-war French aristocracy and deserves a place in any vintage collection.
Find vintage Daphne du Maurier
“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”
During his short life, Poe (1809-1849) completed an impressive body of work which included poetry, critical essays, reviews and short fiction. His three storiesThe Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined LetterandThe Mystery of Marie Roget have a major influence on the modern detective and horror story to this day.
Borrowing the conventions of the gothic novel, his stories create their own distinctive atmosphere of private horror, psychological rather than physical. Obsession verging on madness, and morbid terror approaching total insanity, are frequent themes in his work. If transportation out of your everyday lives is required, why not treat yourself to some vintage Poe from Country House Library? After all, it was Poe who said, “I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.”
Explore vintage Edgar Allan Poe
“He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him.”
A giant of 19th century American literature, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known as Mark Twain, is best known for his two works set along the banks of the Mississippi River -The Adventures of Tom Sawyer andThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
In one of the book’s most famous scenes, Tom is forced to whitewash his Aunt Polly’s fence as a punishment for playing truant. Read the hilarious account of how Tom mischievously persuades others to do the work for him. In another scene, Tom and his friend Huck Finnoth - who are both missing and presumed dead - listen to their own passionate eulogies, before they’re discovered with great uproar in the funeral congregation. Country House Library boasts vintage copies of many of Mark Twain’s finest works.
“Life isn't all beer and skittles; but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education.”
A generation before Mark Twain wrote about Tom Sawyer in America, Thomas Hughes (1822-1896) penned his famous bookTom Brown’s Schooldays. The novel is a lightly fictionalized account of his old public school for boys, Rugby, under the headmastership of Thomas Arnold.
Arnold believed in a ‘muscular Christianity’ – stressing the importance of ethical behaviour and athleticism rather than of academic values. In his novel, Hughes wrote“I want to leave behind me the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one.” Words that encapsulated the spirit of Arnold’s educational philosophy.
This book is a classic of the ‘English public school’ genre, and a must for any fan of the spin- off Flashman novels written by George McDonald Fraser. The roguish Harry Flashman first appeared in Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a bully expelled for drunkenness. Country House Library holds various vintage copies of Hughes’ famous work (and keep a careful watch out for McDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels).
“There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.”
What better way to escape the concerns of 21st century lockdown than by losing yourself in the comic and satirical 1920’s and 30’s world of major English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)?
Capturing the cynical and determined frivolity of the remnants of British aristocracy post World War One, Waugh wrote works of high comedy and social satire that still resonate in the modern world of celebrity and billionaire lifestyles. Waugh’s first best-sellerDecline and Fall (1928) recounts the chequered career of Paul Fennyfeather; sent down from Oxford for ‘indecent behaviour’ as the innocent victim of a drunken orgy, Paul is wrongfully imprisoned for activities in the white slave trade, a sentence he stoically accepts on the grounds that ‘anyone who has been to an English public school will feel comparatively at home in prison.’ Country House Library holds a wide selection of Waugh’s other famous novels and a vintage copy would grace any home collection.
“He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.”
Like Decline and Fall,Forster’sThe Longest Journeyalso begins at university – this time Cambridge, with the lame and delicate Frederick Elliot (nicknamed Rickie). An introspective, comic novel of manners and tragedy, the story tells how Rickie’s literary aspirations gradually fade to a conventional world of conformity and disappointment.
The title of the book is drawn from Shelley’sEpipsychidion‘Who travel to their home among the dead…/With one chained friend…/The dreariest and the longest journeys go.’ Forster (1879-1970) describedThe Longest Journeyas the book “I am most glad to have written.” Country House Library holds vintage copies of this and other great works by Forster including A Room with a Viewand A Passage to India.
“Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest. Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! ...”
Although Stevenson (1850-1894) never consideredTreasure Islandto be anything more than an entertainment for children, it remains his most enduring and famous work, overshadowing his books of greater psychological intensity such asThe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(1886),Kidnapped (1886)andThe Master of Ballantrae(1889).
The story follows Jim Hawkins, the landlady’s son at The Admiral Benbow Inn near the coast in England’s West Country. Hawkins secures the treasure map off the old pirate Billy Bones, and together with Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey they charter the sailboatHispaniola and set sail for Treasure Island. Hawkins soon discovers that the crew includes the pirates led by the charming and villainous one legged ship’s cook, Long John Silver.
Once again, it’s the memorable characters in this literary classic that have guaranteed its place in history. Country House Library is proud to offer new Penguin hardback, cloth bound copies of this literary treasure.
Find vintage Robert Louis Stevenson
Elizabeth Craig’s (1883-1980) writing career began in Dundee where she studied journalism. Craig first ventured into cookery writing forThe Daily Express in 1920, when a fellow journalist commented that she was “the only woman on Fleet Street who could cook.” She published her first cookbook soon after and continued through the Second World War and into the 1970’s. She was the first cookery writer to include using an electric oven for her recipes, and she helped struggling households to manage during years of food scarcity and rationing. In 1941 she wrote
“I’ll take no excuse for a want of variety in meals. ‘Keep out of the rut’ is a motto that should hang in every kitchen. Come along everybody. Let’s do our bit. Armed with wooden spoon, basin, and saucepan we’ll keep the pots boiling whatever happens.”
As well as cooking, Craig published a number of books on housekeeping and gardening. In total, nearly one hundred titles bore her name and she became a major influence on many of today’s celebrity home cooks. Country House Library holds several of Craig’s titles in vintage, hardback format – a must for any collector of cookbooks or anyone who wants an old/new look in their compendium of home recipes.
We all need moments of escape from everyday life, perhaps now more than ever with so much more time being spent close to home. Our books this month are a mixture of classic adult and children’s novels by writers who wrote stories that transported us to different worlds – some real, some make-believe, but all of them a million miles from the everyday. Enjoy!
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