Tag Archives: Beth Chatto

Bookshelf Travelling – 14th December

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Cookery Books

Here I am Bookshelf Travelling again, it’s the shelf above last week’s travelling and it is home to some of my cookery books. On the left hand side there are two copies of the same book –

Cookery in Colour by Marguerite Patten This is the first gift that Jack gave me – he denies this however! Well I suppose he might have bought me some chocolates before buying the book. It did make me think that he was serious enough about me to want to make sure that I could cook and therefore feed him! I bought another pristine copy of the book at a church sale some years ago as my copy has come adrift from its cover and spine, despite being used very carefully. My dad took the book to work and made a plastic cover for it to protect it, so he must have seen something important about it in the family history in the future, if you see what I mean, sadly he died a few years after we got married. The book is very much of its time but I still use quite a lot of the recipes in it. Marguerite Patten was very well known and came to the fore in Britain during the war years when she concocted recipes to help women feed their families while struggling with a lack of ingredients due to the strict rationing. She died just a few years ago.

The Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten was first published in 2002 in association with the Imperial War Museum. It’s subtitled Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1940-1954. Food rationing lasted 14 years in the UK and didn’t end until the 4th of July 1954. Actually it was a bit of a rebellion from women that made the government of the day realise that they were pushing their luck, having rationing long after it had ended in mainland Europe. Marguerite Patten said that the recipes in this book show how difficult it is to cook without butter or margaine. I’ve tried a few of the recipes, such as Woolton Pie and it was quite tasty.

There are a few gardening books on this shelf. Beth Chatto’s Garden Notebook is a book that I’ve just realised I haven’t read although I have read other books by her. For a few years we lived near her famous garden and nursery in Essex, just as she was constructing it all so I did see some of the work going on, before we gave up on Essex and moved back to Scotland. I really have to get around to reading this one.

There are some travel books on the shelf and A Book of Scotland by G.R. Harvey dates from 1950. It’s the sort of book that is ideal for dipping into when you are at a loose end. It’s another one that I haven’t read from cover to cover. It’s published by A&C Black. It has a mixture of black and white and colour plates. It’s older than me and is in better condition!

Are you Bookshelf Travelling this week?

Staircase Wit

Recent Book Purchases

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Books Again

I mentioned earlier that I only bought two books in Wigtown (Scotland’s book town – allegedly). I managed to get a lovely hardback copy of Dorothy Dunnett’s Scales of Gold, it’s one of her House of Niccolo books. I also bought a Virago, The Flint Anchor by Sylvia Townsend Warner in a shop called Byre Books which is hidden away behind some houses on the main street.

Jack had looked up an online list of secondhand bookshops in the UK. There was a shop listed in Gatehouse of Fleet, a very small town with not a lot in it, but a very wee shop on the High Street has a mixture of art and old books for sale. I managed (just) to stop myself from buying any of the art but I couldn’t resist buying three books.

Beth Chatto’s Garden Notebook. I don’t have any of her books but I used to read her articles and when we lived in Essex for a couple of years we were close to her garden, but I used to always just catch a glimpse of it from the bus to Colchester. She died just last week but she was a good old age, over 90.

Peeps at Many Lands is a series of travel books and I bought the Corsica book which was published in 1909. It was written by Ernest Young and illustrated by E.A. Norbury. Published by Adam and Charles Black. It has some nice colour illustrations.

I think the man in the bookshop thought that I just bought books with pretty pictures because the other book I bought there is The Englishman’s Castle by John Gloag with charming illustrations of various sorts of grand homes by Marjory Whittington. This was was published in 1944 and has that Book Production War Economy Standard logo on it. I have quite a lot of books published in wartime and I must say that although the paper was supposedly not the best quality they’ve all fared well over the years, much better than modern paperbacks anyway. They seem to begin to deteriorate after just ten years or so.

Incredibly there’s another bookshop in Gatehouse of Fleet although it’s a bit more difficult to find as it’s housed in part of an old mill by the edge of the River Fleet. It’s a lot bigger and has mainly old books, I don’t think there is much at all in the way of modern-ish paperbacks which suits me fine. I bought a book by J.I.M. Stewart called The Man Who Won the Pools. Also The Garden of Ignorance by Mrs. Marion Cran which was published in 1917 I believe.

The last one I bought there is called Recording Scotland, published by Oliver and Boyd in 1952 and has loads of lovely illustrations of places in Scotland by famous artists. Somewhere I bought a copy of Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time, one of her books she wrote for children.

On the way back home we drove along the Ayrshire coast and into Lanarkshire with the intention of visiting Garrion Bridge, an antiques centre that we hadn’t been to for years. To be honest there’s very little there that could be described as an antique but we did find some books there. So I came away with a couple by D.E. Stevensons – Five Windows and Sarah’s Cottage and also a couple of old but pristine orange Penguin books by the Bradford author Oliver Onions,Widdershins and The Story of Ragged Robin, but those ones are gifts for a friend who collects that author. We were so chuffed to find those ones.

I think you’ll agree that that was quite a haul.