Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Dear Santa: A Bookish List

Last week several folks were posting top ten book wishlists for Christmas.  As usual I'm late to the game, but I'd thought I throw in my bookish wishlist for Santa.  I'm not limiting it too much to exact titles, but rather publishers and authors.




1.  Persephone Books:  I only own two Persephone Classics titles (Agnes Jekyll's Kitchen Essays and Mollie Panter-Downes's Good Evening, Mrs. Craven).  I want any and all of the Persephone titles.  I lust after their dove grey covers, beautiful end papers, and the tales from one of my favorite eras.  Don't think that I haven't thought of using my belly pregnant with my own Persephone as rented ad space for Persephone Books!


2.  Penguin English Library:  I especially long after the Trollope novels from this beautiful paperback sister of the Penguin clothbound books.

3.  Penguin Clothbound books:  Any of them, but especially the Charles Dickens titles and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

4.  Penguin Threads:  Can you tell I'm a Penguin fan?  I'm also a fan of stitching and these books are the marriage between two great loves.


5.  Stella Gibbons:  I own Cold Comfort Farm, but I would love to collect her other titles.


6.  Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset:  Preferably the Penguin Deluxe Edition.


7.  Barbara Pym:  I own Excellent Women, Crampton Hodnet, and Civil to Strangers.  I'd like the entire set.

8.  The Glass of Time by Michael Cox: I own the other companion book to this title, The Meaning of Night.


9.  No Name by Wilkie Collins:  Really any Wilkie Collins would be great.  I own The Moonstone, The Woman in White, and Evil Genius and that's it. 


10.  The Dance to the Music of Time series by Anthony Powell:  BEAUTIFUL volumes.

Whelp... I doubt I'll get books this year (I've asked for many practical things).  I do love daydreaming, books, and lists and this exercise allowed me to indulge my bookish fancies and that makes me a very happy nerd.

4 comments:

kiss a cloud said...

Would you believe we've found three copies of Persephone Books from the thrift store recently? And this wasn't the first time it happened either. Go and hunt them! :)

I'm also coveting the Penguin English Library paperbacks. I have copies of a few Dickens in other editions but deliberating over whether I should get the whole Dickens lot in this edition?

JoAnn said...

Although I just posted mine last week, I could easily add your entire list... just in case Santa needs more options ;-)

chrisa511 said...

I'm so with you on the Penguins!! I've started collecting pretty much all of their different collections :p I got that new Les Mis clothbound hardback and it's GORGEOUS!! And I'm so with you on the Persephones…they're truly book perfection. They make me warm and fuzzy :D

Ruthiella said...

I love the idea of the cloth bound Penguin classics, but are they annotated like the paperbacks I wonder?

I was recently looking for a complete set of the A Dance to the Music of Time in paperback but could not find it for love or money. I noticed them once on Thomas at my Porch's shelves and admired them.