Saturday, April 25, 2020

Stay-at-home shelfie #29



Now we slide over to the nonfiction/history bookshelf, which also has wide shelves that will require two photos apiece. The top shelf is mostly United Kingdom history, appropriate for my Somewhat Welsh Heritage™1

In the top photo, the four slim volumes on the left are part of the Britain in Pictures series and — you guessed it! — I have that on my list of future posts. There are more than 130 books in the series. Ian Mortimer's "Time Traveler's Guides" are fun reading. When I was a kid, one of the books on my parents' shelf that always caught my eye was the circa 1970 hardcover edition of Antonia Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots. It just kind of stood out amid the other books around it. So, partly out of nostalgia and partly because it sounds interesting, I now have a paperback copy. To the right of the Fraser book are a bunch of slim, staplebound volumes from the 1970s Viewing Wales Series. I've mentioned Welsh Ghosts and Welsh Castles, Gardens & Ancient Houses in previous posts.

In the bottom photo, Attention All Shipping relates directly to a post I wrote in August about BBC Radio's Shipping Forecast. Then there some great books about walking and, to an extent, psychogeography. The Country Walks series by London Transport has a storied history; these are 1970s editions. 1962's The London Nobody Knows details many places we can no longer know at all, except through the pages of a book. Shell Guide to Reading the Irish Landscape, The Shell Book of the Home in Britain, How to Read a Village, Shell Guide to Reading the Landscape and Lost Villages of Britain are all fine titles, don't you think? Many of these aforementioned volumes, and also A Walk Around the Snickelways of York, are mentioned in this 2016 post. (Related great link: Mackenzie Crook's love of English landscapes)

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I've been writing most of these shelfie posts one-to-three days in advance. But I'm doing this one live on a sunny Saturday morning, after chores. Here are this morning's headlines on The Washington Post's website:
  • Healthy people in their 30s and 40s barely sick with covid-19 are dying of strokes
  • VA health chief acknowledges a shortage of protective gear for its hospital workers
  • Short on cash, scared of coronavirus, Georgia businesses grapple with reopening
  • U.S. officials scramble to warn against bogus cure floated by Trump
  • Trump says he will block aid for Postal Service if it doesn’t hike prices immediately
  • People are ‘coming from everywhere’ to visit California’s beaches this weekend amid heat wave
  • U.S. coronavirus deaths top 51,000, with fatalities expected to climb

Footnote
1.

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