June 21st, 1848

 A couple of weeks ago I found this treasure in the lovely second-hand book shop in Worcester.

£2.45 for what the back cover rightly calls "three gripping novels by Wilkie Collins". I'm a great fan of Wilkie, and definitely had to snap this one up when I saw it. And having read the two later, shorter novels first (having only previously read them on Project Gutenberg, which is nice in its way but not as good as having a real papery book in your hands), it was only today I came to start on The Moonstone.

And a very appropriate day it is, too, because I'd entirely forgotten that Rachel's birthday party when she receives the eponymous diamond happens on June 21st! I only mention this trifling circumstance because* this is exactly the kind of thing that Gabriel Betteredge would find in his Robinson Crusoe and take as an absolutely certain prophecy of the future! I'm confident that at some point today (better hurry up, it's half past seven already), someone will present me with a diamond worth at least twenty thousand pounds. Or something equally coincidental anyway, like maybe I'll get caught in the rain, fall into a fever and be unable to pass on important information until a plot-convenient moment. Or just do a memory stunt along the lines of the one that forms the climax of the novel.

This "Great Classic Library" was published in 1994, and seems to have been a great way to get some of the more obscure works by great authors into your hands. I'll have to collect them all!

I suspect the choice of which novels to include in each one was dictated as much by page count as by any objective judgement of quality. This Collins compilation is in the wrong order - My Lady's Money came before The Haunted Hotel and Mr Troy the lawyer from the former makes a cameo appearance in the latter, referring back to it. But I'm surprised I haven't come across these volumes before at some point in the last thirty years, and I'm going to have to find space on my bookshelves for them!

Or rather, buy some new bookshelves. My existing ones are full up at the moment, and any new acquisitions have to be wedged in on top of the rows of books. And these are really hefty things - 680 pages in the one I've got! Ooh, maybe someone will give me a bookcase as a present for Rachel Verinder's birthday today! The prophetic powers of Robinson Crusoe work in mysterious ways!

* That was an in-joke to entertain any other Wilkie Collins fans among my readers. His narrators are forever saying "I only mention this trifling circumstance because..." whenever they talk about something they have no reason to mention but which is important for the reader to know in order to make sense of the rest of the story. The existence of a dust-heap, described in minute detail in "The Law and the Lady" is a personal favourite.