Finders keepers

As we set off on holiday, the Guardian published a feature about a new venture from Faber and Faber: it's a scheme called Faber Finds, which proposes to use print on demand technology to reissue out of print books. The feature is all enthusiasm, inviting the usual suspects (that is, those writers whose names appear almost every week in the Guardian Review) to nominate titles they would like to see reissued (most popular choice, Angus Wilson). Looking for the link today, I find it has dropped in Google's listing below a most cautious piece from the previous day's paper, pointing out some of the drawbacks.

Hmm.

Despite which, I have responded to Faber's invitation to suggest suitable books, proposing they consider Eleanor Farjeon's The Silver Curlew and Perkin the Pedlar, and Margery Allingham's The Oaken Heart (a non-fiction book about life in wartime in the village where she lived, which I read about in a biographical note about her, and was shocked to see would set me back £300 if I wanted to buy a copy).