BH, in particular has had good value out of it. A bit of easy reading to dip into when the mood takes one, when one happens to notice it lying about. A relic of days gone by when people read more and watched less television. When they were pleased to find books like this lying around in hotel lounges - or perhaps the country house - or perhaps the house in the country - where they were spending the weekend.
From the foreword we learn that a lot of the material had previously appeared in a magazine called 'The Elizabethan', of which the compilers were one-time editors. While from Bing I learned that the magazine started life in 1948 in Canada (due to paper shortages at home) as the 'Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls', changed to 'The Young Elizabethan' shortly before the coronation of our present monarch and then changed again to 'The Elizabethan'. Its intended audience were the inhabitants of the grammar schools which were then a feature of the land and it ceased publication in 1973, a little less than 10 years after the present volume was published. All of which makes the material in the present book even more of an anachronism now.
One of the features of the book is the rather mixed quality of the illustrations, printed in-page in black and white, quite possibly mostly from woodcuts. With that shown above, from the long story called 'The Woodcutter's House', noticed in the previous post, being about average. We were reminded of the rather bad illustrations in our collected Agatha from Heron. Perhaps wisely, our collected Maigret does not attempt illustrations: not something which should be done on a budget.
Another feature is the brown edge colour of the sixteen pages of the signature marked 'V' bottom right, otherwise pages 305 to 320 inclusive. With the puzzle being what caused the edges of those pages to appear brown, while the rest appear white? Is it some function of the way they were cut or did those pages get stained in some way?
I think I have typed myself onto the compost heap. We have plenty of interesting relics of the book trade on our shelves, more than enough, so this one does not make the cut.
PS: one such relic which turned up yesterday was the bound version of a PhD dissertation from 1970 from the University of Hull entitled 'Aspects of annelid behaviour and physiology', the work of one Malcolm Kirk Seymour, who, according to Google, went on to work at the Rothamsted Experimental Station. A bound version of a carbon copy of a typescript, autographed for one Professor G. P. Wells by the author. From the days when such things used to be lodged in university libraries for posterity - with the authors sneaking back from time to time to check whether anyone had taken their books out. Or not. Not like our days of PLOS and computerised citations at all.
PPS: almost certainly the Wells at reference 2. The son of the science fiction writer, with the book perhaps coming to me sometime after the son's widow disposed of most of his books when she downsized.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/trolley-hunt-in-ryde.html.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._P._Wells.
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