I think a lot of us have been casting our minds back recently, trying to remember authors whom we’ve enjoyed in the past, I know I have been anyway and other bloggers and commentators have weighed in with their suggestions too. So my author list is ever lengthening in fact it’s just growing and growing like Topsy!

I’m hoping to read more Mary Stewarts soon, in fact I bought a hardback copy of The Wicked Day for pennies from Amazon so I’m looking forward to reading that. And I’m looking for more by Angela Thirkell and D.E. Stevenson. Niranjana (Brown Paper) has just reminded me of Elizabeth Jane Howard.

But what I really want to know is: Has anybody read anything by Mazo de la Roche? She wrote a lot of books and in the first library that I worked in there was a shelf full of them, but that was in the 1970s and they were regarded as being old-fashioned then. As I recall the shelf was just one big mass of pink covers which never moved. I have an urge to try them out now, the Jalna series anyway but I’m wondering if they are worth reading. Her name sounds very exotic but she seems to have been a Canadian writer.

I have a vague feeling that I have read at least one book by Audrey Erskine Lindop but so long ago that I can’t remember for sure. Has anyone read anything by her? If so, would you recommend giving her a go?

It would seem that a lot of readers have been quietly ‘doing their bit’ to save neglected books. If you haven’t already read her post have a look at what Danielle at A Work in Progress has written about it.

I know that libraries have to make space for new books but it means that books are sold off or they languish in the Reserve Stock where ordinary readers can’t browse. I love the idea of readers going around borrowing books in the hope of saving them for another generation of readers.

If we were doing it for anything else other than books we would be a pressure group and have a proper name. I’ve been amusing myself thinking of what we could be called. From an Edinburgh point of view we would have to be The Book Resurrectionists. Or is it more akin to defibrillating – Book Paramedics or The CPR Book Group.

Anyway if you pick up a book in your library and it’s a good long while since it has been borrowed, make it happy and give it a go. After all it was once somebody’s ‘baby’!!