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Finds

A slow start to 2025 for posting, but certainly not a slow start for reading. More of that later, but this post is a report of Saturday afternoon's excursion along Rochester High Street and some pleasing finds. A separate post will be required for the previous weekend's trip to Hythe and Dymchurch.

Along the High Street in the charity shops, in Baggins, and in Shop 104, I was lucky enough to find:

  • The latest Kate Atkinson Jackson Brodie in brand new paperback, in a special independent bookshop edition with sprayed black edges. Yes, I know I was lucky enough to go and get a 'signed' edition (well, stamped due to wrist problems) of the hardback first edition from the author herself, but that's hardly the point. Certain books need to be owned many-times over.
  • Three more Elly Griffiths paperbacks for the collection - two Brighton Mysteries and one Ruth Galloway and, as it turns out, the first Ruth Galloway, which was a bonus.
  • A first printing of Trigger Mortis in paperback (which I didn't own at all - stupidly I went through a phase, pre major Bond collecting, of thinking that the hardback first edition was enough. At least I'd got the US first as well!).
  • Some Ellis Peters. Dad was a big fan and had all of the Cadfael books. He even treated himself to the final, 20th instalment in hardback, so finding no.20 in paperback was rather nice for completeness, just as I found 4-6 in paperback at Blickling last year to fill the gap left because of his omnibus copy. Dad had also done a good job of ferreting out the non-Cadfael Peters paperbacks, including most of the Dominic Felse stories. I'm just gradually finishing off the job for him.
  • A rather nice box set of the first three books in Iain (M) Banks's Culture series, none of which I owned. Out of the ten, that brings me up to nine owned (mixture of paperbacks and first editions), and I just need Look to Windward (7/10) to complete the set.
  • A British Library Crime Classics paperback to add to a collection which I think was started in an antique centre in Hungerford. This one was a winner as it is a collection of short stories and the first one is by Arthur Conan Doyle.
  • Solitude Creek by Jeffery Deaver, which was the only Kathryn Dance book I didn't have in first edition.
  • The Secret of Cold Hill by Peter James (1st), just because it looked like an interesting non-Grace book.
  • In a House of Lies by Ian Rankin, which is Rebus 22, and which takes my gradually expanding collection of Rankin firsts up, I think, to 11.
  • Counting the Eons by Isaac Asimov. Like so many authors, Asimov never missed an opportunity to get paid twice for the same piece of writing. You don't get to publish the many hundreds of books that he did without exploiting this trick, and several others, to its fullest extent. It turns out that Counting the Eons is a collection of his essays previously published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. More specifically it is his 16th of 22 such collections. Alarmingly, I think it is the first one I've ever bought. Oh well. Still, it is a nice 80s-looking paperback with the familiar cover writing and artwork.


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