Apparently, it's World Book Day

For as long as I can recall, I have loved books of all sorts. For the past number of years, I have developed an affinity for nostalgic covers, and those books with beautiful inscriptions written in flowing script with a fountain pen.

Troutmark Books, Castle Arcade, Cardiff

When I grew up in the U.K. in the 1960s, I read many of the British series of Ladybird children's books. Today, they have become collectors' items, especially those with dust jackets.

Last year, I made a deliberate effort to look in thrift shops, old book shops, and online sellers, to find them. Most, however, were found in thrift shops and local online sellers. I don't collect them for their condition, per se, but rather for their nostalgic content and for our granddaughters when they are old enough to understand them better and when they start to learn to read.

Sometimes, in the U.K. and here in North America, I'll come across books unexpectedly. So it was when I came across this old Thomas & Evans of Hannah Street, Porth, book. I found it in a charity shop in nearby Tonypandy.

Thomas & Evans Record Book

It looks to be a record book, but the owner used it for recipes, written in keeping with times past, with a fountain pen, its ink faded just slightly over the past seventy or eighty years. On the first page is a recipe for cough mixture, containing a number of ingredients, including horehound, laudanum, and paregoric.

I wonder where this book has been, who its owner was, and when it was used. I bought it for its nostalgic worth alone; I remember Thomas & Evans throughout the Rhondda when I was a child.

That childhood consisted of many books: Bought for me, gifted to me, read to me, and recollections of libraries, especially the library in Muswell Hill, London, N10. As a child in London, during the second half of the 1960s, we were read many books in class and the one that stands out is The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. Our teacher, Mr. Walters would sit on the edge of his desk with one foot resting on the edge of our table. He held the book in front of him at chest level with one hand and enunciated the words clearly in his Welsh accent.

I am still fascinated by books, not the latest list of bestsellers, or what "must" be read, but rather the tried and true classics, especially children's books of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The illustrations alone are worth their now small price. Adult non-fiction interests me more than fiction, except when it comes to the late English author, Graham Greene, and the late Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. I have three shelves in my bookcase that are a mix of fiction and non-fiction WW2 Great Britain and each time I think I should donate them, I question why, when I still enjoy reading them.

So, on this World Book Day, pick up a book that appeals to you, not a book that someone tells you that you must read, but one that simply satisfies your curiosity.