![]() Volumes with their brooding jacket designs and illustrations, inextricable from the text itself.īook covers and illustrations are especially important for young readers. Though the republishing is to be applauded, the drabness of the presentation is a little disappointing. ![]() The print-on-demand volumes are uniform in design, utterly belying the lively contents: a plain background of faded text against some dull colour such as maroon or grey-green, crossed by a band with the title and the author’s signature. ![]() I sent off for a batch of the first titles, hoping to relive those hours of childish absorption. Now a new generation will be able to enter his grimly thrilling world Random House Children’s Books are planning to bring his work gradually back into print (or at least, print on demand and ebook). He seems less well-known today, but no child’s bookshelf used to be complete without a copy of Smith, Black Jack or Devil-in-the-Fog. It was probably at the library, if not at school, that I first came across the novels and short stories of Leon Garfield, then rated very high in the ranks of literature for children, winning the Whitbread, the Carnegie and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. I never forgot the disappointment on the face of the librarian as I bluffed and blushed, and though I got my sign-off, I never tried to pull a fast one again. It took me two years, and I only cheated on one title, pretending to have read Oliver Twist having only seen the film. The leap to gold was huge: ninety books had to be read. There were three certificates awarded when set levels were passed: bronze, for the first ten books – any dolt could manage that – and silver for forty. The librarian would whisk you away to a quiet corner and gently probe, with questions ranging from simple plot points to more subtle analysis. ‘I’m return- ing these, and I’d like to be tested on these two, please,’ became the Saturday morning mantra. On signing up, young bibliophiles were given a kind of passport to be signed, signifying that a book had been read and absorbed. A separate section was set aside for a few hundred librarian-approved books, suitable for various ages and abilities. My read- ing habit far outstripped my pocket money, so many novels were encountered through an inspired reading scheme at the town library. I favoured timeslip novels or those with a hint of the supernatural. But gradually the idea of authors and oeuvres, of distinct sensibilities and bodies of work, dimly began to form. Blunden, The Children of Green Knowe, Tom’s Midnight Garden and When Marnie was There. Novels jumbled about in my head, The Little White Horse rubbing alongside The Amazing Mr. Why didn’t the Famous Five ever need to go to the toilet, even when they had been locked up in a castle dungeon overnight? Separate books by different authors all occupied the same fictional space: Narnia was cotermi- nous with the riverbank of Rat and Mole, and not far from Mary Lennox’s secret garden. ![]() The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was one of my favourites, its adventures thrilling, its two complementary heroines utterly beguiling so why were the follow-on titles Black Hearts in Battersea and Nightbirds On Nantucket so disappointing in comparison, when they were just as ‘true’? It took an adult re-reading to pinpoint the flaw, for me, of making Dido Twite the heroine of subsequent books, an endlessly indulged character more loved by its author than the reader.īecause stories were true, inconsistencies were devastating and best skated over. The seeds of a future career as a literary critic may have been sown at this time, but the sense of books as unchangeable meant the penny of critique took a long time to drop. ![]() Though I read constantly, I didn’t understand the concept of a professional writer, or connect the stories we wrote for school with anything in a book. The writers of the books I idolised were denizens of some Dantean heavenly sphere outside time it would never have occurred to me that they might be located by the Royal Mail for the price of a stamp. They seemed beamed down, not crafted and certainly not ‘made up’. When I was a child, books were eternal artefacts, as old as the stars, bring- ing news from regions just as distant. ![]()
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