Dusty Bookshelves

THE LEAVING DAY is approaching fast and Tui and I are building & dismantling in clouds of sawdust & bookdust respectively. He has made more wonderful shelves and cupboards and the truck is getting more and more nookish by the day. The days here are not at the moment quite what you'd call days.. the darkness of the nighttime gets a little greyer between morning and afternoon and then it's night again! And all the while we are lashed with freezing rain.
Anyhow, from nookish things to bookish things ... I am now sitting amongst stalagmites of books, towering in teetering spires around and about me, and breathing in the floating blankets of dust that have been softly mustering atop the bookedges over time. I think I have selected my most used and treasured and least heavy books for the invitingly lovely bookshelves ready in the wheeled house. Some more good but un-squeezable-inable books will go to my parents' house :) and the last lot ... is for you! Yes.. indeed, I thought that you discerning Hermitage-reading folks would be interested to virtually browse my book shelves and avail yourself of a bargain. There's to be a Hermitage book sale! I have been a book hoarder for a long time, and I have had to be brutal. So there are some great books there .. on such diverting subjects as: tree lore, book arts apprenticeships, elvish, devils, medieval books of hours, runes, nursery rhymes, holy wells, tin whistles, fairground transport, children's book illustrating, fairy tales, anarchism and a plethora of stories...



I have put the books all on one long page, in sections by subject. And the sale can be found by clicking on that there rusty book sign to the below right. As soon as a book is bought, I'll remove the paypal button, but if two people should buy the same book whilst I am sleeping, I'll send it to whoever got it first, and I'll refund the unlucky one! If anyone can suggest a more hi-tech way of dealing with this problem I'd be grateful, but as it is I have spent two days listing everything on here... I'd love to write a little something about each book, but I think I might be going crosseyed with the effort.
Just imagine yourself standing in one of those old rickety-shelved second hand bookshops in cathedral towns where the proprietor is reading a tea-stained newspaper and customers shuffle past each other apologetically peering up and down the bookspines. There'll be a spiral staircase up or down to a chilly room with even more interesting and obscure books in difficult piles and a damp anorak draped over the radiator. To leave, you'll have to cough quietly, step around many boxes of unpacked unshelved books (possibly from the houses of dead people), and you'll emerge into the day having left a substantial number of hours behind, wedged between the yellowed pages of silverfish-nibbled academia.