Saturday, May 15, 2010

Aunt Kitsie

In a really awesome development all round, I found Bobby Bear's Annual 1933 in the Oxfam shop in town today, for only £3! More than a hundred pages of comics, stories, puzzles and instructions for making a book-table with two leaves from a wooden packing case! Two of the filler stories are even early works by Norman Hunter that I've never read before! This completely surpasses even the 1950 Toby Twirl book that I found in another Beeston junk shop last year, and proves that I'm living in the land of antiquarian anthropomorphic animal annuals!

Now, please go out and buy some Kiwi boot polish.


On an unrelated note, if you eat a lot of cherries, do they each count as one of your five a day?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is the 1950 Toby Twirl the one with the flying tortoise on the front cover? I don't suppose it's one of the rarities with a printed title on the spine is it? It's worth about £45 so I hope you paid less. (With the title on the spine it might be worth £80. Ive got the 1947 and the 1948 - everybody's got the 1948 it seems. There is a group of TT fans on facebook but it's a bit moribund. I love the Kiwi advert! All the best.

Zoomy said...

That's the one! The tortoise turns out to be called Basil, and he belongs to a magician. No title on the spine, but I only paid a pound for it, so I don't mind that much. It's been scribbled on a lot with pencil and yellow crayon, so I doubt it'd fetch £45, but it's still fun to read!

Katy said...

Cherries - yes. About a handful of the things.

And typically, it only just occurred to me to mention this a few weeks after you visited Cambridge, but next time you're here, there's a bookshop you might like. Down a little alleyway opposite the front gate of Kings College. Specialises in old childrens books, and tends to have quite a few annuals (a friend o mine collects Ruperts, and they had their own special in there, there were so many of them).

Katy said...

oops - managed to delete a word! That should say they have their own special bookcase !

Zoomy said...

PS Having checked out the Facebook group, if the Anonymouse up there is my mother, I'll put the Toby Twirl in the post for you to read - I had no idea you were a fan!

Zoomy said...

And Jenny, woo, I'll have to find another excuse to visit Cambridge! Thanks!

Aileen said...

Yes, the anonymouse up there is your mother but I thought it would be too embarrassing to sign myself Mummy. I love Toby Twirl - I thought you knew!

Katy said...

Having hunted out their website - the shop I mentionned is http://www.sarahkeybooks.co.uk/ - if you want specific titles, it's worth a look, but I bet you'd probably find 3 times as many that you didn't know you wanted simply by browsing the shelves in person.

I didn't know about this one myself, but have a feeling you might also like the second one down on this list - http://www.inprint.co.uk/thebookguide/shops/east_anglia/cambridge.shtml

Katy said...

Hmm, that link didn't work as planned. Try deleting the spaces from the following:

http://www.inprint.co.uk/ thebookguide/ shops/ east_anglia/ cambridge.shtml

Zoomy said...

It worked for me, I just copied and pasted it. And yep, that sounds like my kind of bookshop! Both of them do, actually - Sarah Key gets extra appreciation for the picture of William and the Space Animal!