Alan Garner & Rosemary Harris - Weirdstones & Ancient Egypt

I discovered Alan Garner in 1968 as I was buying books on my meagre allowance and exploring the children's books sections of various bookshops. Alan Garner's books were quite wonderful - exciting supernatural fantasies, to which I became addicted. The first of these was The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath.

Of course after that I looked for his books whenever I was book browsing. The Owl Service was made into a Television Series in 1969, so the cover of my copy has a scene from that, though I am sure I had another edition of it originally. Elidor is the other fantasy of Alan Garner's I have in my collection.

Rosemary Harris wrote a charming trilogy set in ancient Israel and Egypt which began with the Carnegie Medal winner The Moon in the Cloud, where a humble animal tamer and musician is forced by Noah of Noah's Ark fame, to fetch a cat in Egypt to make a pair with his (the animal tamer) own cat. The condition is that he must find the cat to be included on the Ark, otherwise he and his wife will be left to drown. The story follows his adventures as he makes his way to Egypt and how he secures the cat.

The story is continued post flood in The Shadow of the Sun and The Bright and Morning Star. All the books are beautifully written and slyly humorous.

Coming next - more children's fantasy - Madeleine L'Engle and Peter Dickinson

Art - Fairy & Folk Tales Illustration

I have quite a few large format books on fairy & folk tales. Some are collections , like World Tales, which is actually very interesting in the selection of the tales and in the illustrations that accompany each tale, executed by different artists. The below illustration is by Sue Porter for Tales of A Parrot - a fairy tale from India.

Another collection of various fairy stories illustrated by the master Arthur Rackham.

A book on the life and art of Arthur Rackham

Next a collection of Victorian Fairy Tales and Swedish Fairy Tales illustrated by John Bauer.

Moonlight & Fairyland is a beautiful edition of fairy tales written by Laurence Housman.

Snow White translated by Randall Jarrell & delicately illustrated by Ekholm Burket and a book on the graphic illustrations of Walter Crane.

The following book is a sort of large chapbook edition of Beauty & The Beast illustrated by Michael Hague. Below is the front page with accompanying illustration. The high resolution pictures are tipped in adding class to what is really a very lovely book.

And finally, a collection of stories by Alan Garner about fools called The Guizer - A Book of Fools. This book for some reason reminds me of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker - it has that same primitive strangeness about it.

I've always been taken with the epigraph to the book - words spoken by the Eskimo Anarulunguaq, when he stood on the roof of a skyscraper overlooking New York.

"I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we knew, and that this is part of another life"

Coming next - pop culture.

More Modern Firsts – Brautigan, Le Guin, Russ, Eco, Vonnegut etc.

It has certainly been interesting for me going through my bookshelves for the purpose of this blog. I have been struck by the fact that there are many books that I haven’t read in years, or even read a first time. A lot of them could do with a looking over in the future. Oh well, perhaps when I retire from work this can be accomplished.

So on with modern firsts...

I found the Joanna Russ book Extraordinary People and Deborah Levy’s Beautiful Mutants on the remainder table at Reading Books a bookstore in Carlton – fine editions to add my library.

I am proud to have first editions of Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, purchased when they were first published in 1974 and 1973 respectively. These two authors were immensely popular in 1960s and 70s though they are less read these days, more’s the pity. Brautigan was a unique stylist and Vonnegut was also part of that period of innovative and original writing which seemed to suddenly spring up in the late sixties and continued on into the seventies.

The Dispossessed won Ursula Le Guin the Hugo in 1975. The 1975 World Science Fiction Convention was held for the first time in Australia in my home town of Melbourne and Ursula Le Guin was the Guest of Honour. At the time I working for a Science Fiction bookshop, Space Age Books, so I got to meet Ursula Le Guin in person and she signed my copy of the book.

Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum is one of those novels that people either love or hate. I know people who couldn’t be bothered reading it to the finish, but I am not one of them. I’ve even read it several times.

Next, to get this Modern Firsts section over, are two fantasy novels acquired at the time of publication.

Patricia McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld is a delightful fantasy and one of her best loved books. It won the World Fantasy Award in 1975.

Another odd book is The Grey Gentlemen by Michael Ende. I think I bought this one for its cover, and though I did read it way back in the 1970s I can’t remember a thing about it.

And finally…

Red Shift by Alan Garner and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, which won the Booker Prize in 1992, are practically the last of the modern firsts on the small bookshelf, though I have plenty more on the bigger shelves.