shewhomust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shewhomust) wrote2005-03-26 09:39 am
shewhomust) wrote2005-03-26 09:39 am
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A grey day redeemed by book-buying.
The weather forecast said overcast at first, better in the west, brighter later, and sunshine over the whole country by three o' clock. I guess that didn't include the North Pennines, where the mist rolled up the valleys and met the low cloud on the high fells. Lower down you could sometimes see across the width of a field (usually with a pheasant or two in it: on the basis of today's observations, the pheasant is the commonest bird in England - by a wide margin) but mostly you couldn't see beyond the dry stone walls.
So we gave up our plans to go walking, and took refuge in the bookshop in Alston. This turned out to be full of the sort of books which only last week I had been complaining you never saw any more, genuinely old books, maybe a little dusty or dog-eared, but a greater variety than the recent best-sellers and remaindered items which seem to fill the bookshops. Naturally, I bought books...
Peekskill: USA is Howard Fast's (yes, Howard Fast, the man who wrote Spartacus) account of events in New York State in 1949, when a Paul Robeson concert was attacked by - not to put to fine a point on it - a right wing mob. Fast was there: in fact he was to be chairman of the concert (and it says something about the concert, I suppose, that it was to have a chairman rather than a compere).
Paul Robeson was one of the heroes of my "red diaper" childhood, and I was brought up on tales of how, denied a platform in the US, he sang at a concert just across the border in Canada, with an audience in two countries. But I don't know this story at all, and now here it is, in a neat little board-bound edition with lots of photos, in the distinctive typeface of the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.
Plus a 1943 copy of The Wallet of Kai Lung, with dust-jacket.
Not altogether a wasted day, then...
So we gave up our plans to go walking, and took refuge in the bookshop in Alston. This turned out to be full of the sort of books which only last week I had been complaining you never saw any more, genuinely old books, maybe a little dusty or dog-eared, but a greater variety than the recent best-sellers and remaindered items which seem to fill the bookshops. Naturally, I bought books...
Peekskill: USA is Howard Fast's (yes, Howard Fast, the man who wrote Spartacus) account of events in New York State in 1949, when a Paul Robeson concert was attacked by - not to put to fine a point on it - a right wing mob. Fast was there: in fact he was to be chairman of the concert (and it says something about the concert, I suppose, that it was to have a chairman rather than a compere).
Paul Robeson was one of the heroes of my "red diaper" childhood, and I was brought up on tales of how, denied a platform in the US, he sang at a concert just across the border in Canada, with an audience in two countries. But I don't know this story at all, and now here it is, in a neat little board-bound edition with lots of photos, in the distinctive typeface of the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.
Plus a 1943 copy of The Wallet of Kai Lung, with dust-jacket.
Not altogether a wasted day, then...
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