Secondhand Vintage Hardback Fiction & Biography Bargain Book Box SP4102

Secondhand Vintage Hardback Fiction & Biography Bargain Book Box SP4102

Twenty-one hardbacks from the 1940s to 60s, all in their dust jackets: two each from Georgette Heyer, Elizabeth Goudge and Rumer Godden, with Norman Lewis, Monica Dickens, Osbert Sitwell, Malcolm Muggeridge and Carola Oman’s Nelson. Mid-century storytellers in their period jackets, and the jacket art is half the appeal.

1. The Scent of Water — Elizabeth Goudge — Mary, fifty and unmarried, leaves London for a country cottage left to her by a cousin she met once. In the cousin’s diaries she finds a woman who lived with mental illness and came through it. Goudge’s wisest novel.
2. Frederica — Georgette Heyer — The bored Marquis of Alverstoke agrees to launch a distant cousin’s beautiful sister into society, mainly to annoy his own sisters. He hadn’t counted on her younger brothers, a very large dog or a balloon ascent. Among Heyer’s funniest.
3. A Hill in Korea — Simon Kent — A small British patrol is cut off behind enemy lines in the Korean War and has to fight its way back. It was filmed in 1956, with Michael Caine in one of his first screen roles.
4. You Have Been Warned — Fougasse & McCullough — A comic guide to the road and everyone who uses it, drawn by Fougasse, the cartoonist of the wartime “Careless Talk Costs Lives” posters. The traffic-light jacket is a design classic.
5. Dear Mad’m — Stella W. Patterson — At eighty, the author moved alone to a cabin on a mining claim in the mountains of northern California. This is her account of the first year, with bears, floods and two young miners who called her “Mad’m”.
6. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita — Rumer Godden — A mother leaves her family for a film director and goes to live with him in a villa on Lake Garda. Her two children run away from England to fetch her back, and they fight hard.
7. The White Witch — Elizabeth Goudge — An Oxfordshire village is divided by the English Civil War, and Froniga, half gypsy and a healer, has people she loves on both sides.
8. Smiley Gets a Gun — Moore Raymond — Smiley, a barefoot boy in an Australian bush town, is promised a rifle by the local sergeant if he can stay out of trouble. He can’t. The sequel to Smiley, and a film in 1958.
9. God’s Frontier — José Luis Martín Descalzo — A Spanish village is dying of drought, and a humble railway worker appears to be performing miracles. The villagers want only one thing from him. A prize-winning Spanish novel by a priest.
10. Laughter in the Next Room — Osbert Sitwell — The fourth volume of his autobiography, covering the 1920s: the first performance of Façade, the literary feuds, and his magnificently impossible father, Sir George.
11. The Day of the Fox — Norman Lewis — A man comes home to a Spanish fishing village as a hero of the winning side in the Civil War, and his neighbours freeze him out. A novel by the great travel writer, who lived in such a village.
12. Kingfishers Catch Fire — Rumer Godden — An Englishwoman with two children and little money rents a house in Kashmir, sure she can live simply among the villagers. She misreads everything, and it nearly kills her. Drawn from Godden’s own life.
13. Nelson — Carola Oman — The full life, from the parsonage in Norfolk to Trafalgar, with Emma Hamilton given her due. It won the James Tait Black Prize and was long the standard biography.
14. April Lady — Georgette Heyer — Nell, a young countess, has run up debts she daren’t confess to her husband, who she believes married her for convenience. He believes she married him for money. A Regency comedy of misunderstanding.
15. Mary Bravender — Olga Stringfellow — A historical novel of a young woman making a new life in colonial New Zealand, by a New Zealand author. The redhead on the jacket sets the tone.
16. Death in the Desert — Paul I. Wellman — The fifty years’ war for the American Southwest: Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, Geronimo and the Apache campaigns, told as narrative history by a newspaperman who knew the country.
17. The Purple and the Scarlet — Guy Schofield — What happened after the death of Christ? An account of the first Christians and the Roman empire they lived under, written for the general reader.
18. A Savage Place — Frank G. Slaughter — A medical novel from the surgeon-turned-author who sold tens of millions of copies. The jacket shows a young doctor under the operating light.
19. The Thirties — Malcolm Muggeridge — A sardonic history of the decade in Britain, from the Depression to the outbreak of war, written in 1939 while it was still warm. Nobody in public life escapes.
20. The Doctor’s Temptation — Hans Kades — A young doctor is torn between the demands of his oath and “the call of the flesh”, according to the jacket. A German medical melodrama.
21. My Turn to Make the Tea — Monica Dickens — Her year as a junior reporter on a provincial newspaper, covering flower shows and inquests and living in a boarding house. Funny and affectionate, by Charles Dickens’s great-granddaughter.