Cabinet of Curiosities: Collins' Classics & Jane Austen by Charlotte Wightwick

This month the History Girls have a Jane Austen theme so when it came to considering what to put into the Cabinet of Curiosities, it seemed only appropriate to bring my own little piece of Jane Austen with me – my copies of her novels.

I’m not one of those people who go on constantly about how wonderful printed books are over and above e-books: I love my Kindle, and with good reason (holidays, it turns out, are much more fun when you aren’t lugging 10 paperbacks around. Hating what you’re reading on a 4-hour train journey? Not a problem!)

However my Jane Austen novels are special to me.

They were given to me by my grandparents. I was a bookish teenager and had actually read Austen previously – my mum’s copies, when I was about 12 – and just hadn’t got her. Too much sitting around talking, not enough stuff happening (I know, I know – all I can say is that I was young.) So I said ‘thank you’ politely and wondered what on earth I was supposed to do with a set of books which a) we already had in the house and b) I knew I didn’t like (even though they were Classics).

Then came that adaptation in the mid-90s and I realised that, wet shirts aside, Jane Austen was funny. Really, really funny. And sad and clever and romantic and wonderfully, wonderfully human. So I was off, re-reading the lot within weeks and falling irrevocably in love with her characters, her plots and her writing. And I read my own copies. Here they are:

They’re unlike any books I owned at the time.

They were obviously old – not ancient, but definitely not new (I can’t recall where my grandparents said they’d got them, sadly.) The title page informs me that they are part of ‘Collins Library of Classics’, although they contain no date of printing. A quick online skim says that they were published between 1903 and 1945, probably in the 1930s.

For another thing, they were small, much smaller than a standard paperback (6 x 4 inches rather than approx. 7.5 x 5), red-bound with gold lettering on the spine. The pages were made of much thinner paper than I was used to handling and each included a picture opposite the frontispiece. And they had that proper old-book smell.

 So having started by saying I love my Kindle – and I do – it is also right that reading Jane Austen is still a very different experience for me when I pick up my little red copies. I do have e-copies (and audiobooks too) and they are wonderful novels in whatever format I choose. But when I read them in their physical form, they look, smell and feel as they did that (second) time I read Jane Austen: they are excitement, discovery and emotion made real. And that’s what books should do, surely?

Shakespearean Sonnets Read - Joan Lennon

I have a pretty red-and-gold leather-bound book of Shakespeare's Sonnets (a fine find from a charity shop) which I keep by my bed.  I have several times now set myself the challenge of reading a few a night, until I had read them all.  It really hasn't worked.  They ask more than my semi-somnolent mind can muster.  How much better to listen with my ears than to try to comprehend with my tired, skimming-prone eyes.  And how much better to hear the sonnets spoken by those who can give each word its proper weight, each phrase its richest cadence.

I went looking, and here are just a few - even if it isn't your bedtime, enjoy! 

(There is a luscious-looking app of all the sonnets read by actors-to-die-for, which I would love to take to bed, but as far as I can figure out, it's not for my computer or phone ... sigh.)

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Silver Skin.

Where the Dickens is my Club Card, by K. M. Grant

I'm now so hooked on audio books that those two little earphony white snails dangle permanently down my front.   This is a boon and a curse.  It's a boon, in that what wouldn't our ancestors have given to escape the mundane entirely at their convenience?  Those longuers in hideously uncomfortable carriages would have been transformed by, say, Martin Chuzzlewhit, Vanity Fair or a Philosophy Bites podcast.

The curse is that when Jo is dying (Bleak House), or Keith Talent's at the darts (London Fields), or I'm singing with Mollie (Ulysses) it's hard to concentrate on, for example, the shopping.  Last week, in Tesco's, the brown-shirts had just invaded the Ephrussi house in Vienna (The Hair with Amber Eyes).  At the checkout, they hurled Emmy's dressingtable over the balustrade.  Asked if I had a club card, I heard only the dressingtable hit the marble.  When I got home, my shopping had apparently been done by a lunatic.  No cheese.  Three apples.  Something I had taken for cream but wasn't.  Sweetcorn instead of peas.  Edmund de Waal had ruined our dinner.

In the park, shrieking at my dogs (I'm deaf, with the snails in my ears, and irritable since I don't want to miss a word and the dogs will lag and dawdle to sniff) I felt my mobile vibrate. Unable to find the pause button (iPod nanos are very nano indeed) I pulled a snail out of my left ear, answered my phone and found myself, in a second or two, live on the radio talking about something or other, with Lolita still pouring into my right ear.  I tried to make sense for my radio audience, but they may have got more than they bargained for, with Lolita clearly audible from the dangling left snail.  Why didn't I just pull the whole snail contraption from the socket?  I've no idea.  You become slightly deranged when attached to great literature.

And other people get involved.  Slightly weepy (Ragtime - it's Doctorow reading his own work that gets me) I find myself patted on the shoulder by strangers.   I've given up trying to explain, since this alarms people.  I forget we're inhabiting different worlds and I'm sure they want to enter mine as little as I want to enter theirs.  Luckily, you can't yet get Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety on audiobook.  I'd be a wreck hearing the gravelly tones of Sean Barrett intone, 'There is a point beyond which - convention and imagination dictate - we cannot go;  perhaps it's here, when the carts decant on to the scaffold their freight ... Camille is now, suddenly, calm ... For ten seconds Danton looks away. After that he watches everything ... He watches each death, until he is tutored to his own.'

A little Waugh next.  Scoop, perhaps, if it's available.   I'll be cackling in the post office queue and metaphorically shaking my fist at lorries and buses who dare drown out the voice of William Boot.  At least I hope metaphorically.  Once plugged in, imagination and reality fuse together.  I may not be quite myself.  If you hear I've been arrested, you'll know why.   I went to a convent school so am perfectly at home in institutions and just imagine how many audio books could fill a decent ten year stretch.

Happy New Year!