Guest Post: Beautiful Clutter on Vintage Children's Books

Welcoming my good friend, fellow tea supper and collector of pretty treasures, Jem, of Beautiful Clutter...

Charity shops in general can be treasure troves for magpies like me, but charity bookshops are fantastic places!  Books have been my chief addiction for as long as I can remember, as a child it didn’t take me long to work out that by hunting for the books I wanted in the local charity bookshop my pocket money would stretch that much further.  Today these are where I tend to find most of the vintage and retro children’s books I come home with – especially with jumbles and car boot sales thin on the ground in my area.

My reading diet is generally a mixture of classics, contemporary fiction and fantasy – so the old children’s books I find are a brilliant palate cleanser between lengthier reads, besides which they put me in such a cheerful mood. I recently re-read my whole Beatrix Potter collection – one of the many things Anna and I have in common is a love of Miss Potter – as a January blues beater, and it worked! I think the NHS ought to look into handing out bundles of half a dozen childhood favourites to everyone having a miserable time in hospital, I can’t testify to their effectiveness as a painkiller but as a mood-booster they score very well!

With anything second (or third, or fourth!) hand comes a quirk or two; I’ll often find an exuberant crayon annotation, dog-eared pages, or a handwritten dedication on the inside front cover. Once I found a perfectly flat daisy, obviously left over from a flower-pressing experiment, in the middle of an Enid Blyton book, which made my heart sing.  These little things just add to the charm, because in general old copies of children’s books are beautiful things – the vivid covers, the illustrations inside, even the typography - are all wonderfully nostalgic. It seems funny to say that when most of the books I pick up were printed decades before I came into the world, but I’ve always felt I was  born into the wrong era!

There is a line in one of my favourite films ‘You’ve Got Mail’ from Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan) the owner of The Shop Around the Corner. Her children’s bookshop in New York is under threat of closure with a behemoth of a discount bookstore opening across the street, she said something that has always stayed with me:

‘I started helping my mother after school here when I was six years old. And I used to watch her. And it wasn’t just that she was selling books, it was that she was helping people become whoever it was (that) they were going to turn out to be. Because when you read a book as a child it becomes part of your identity in a way no other reading in your whole life does . . .’ 

To my mind she hit the nail right on the head, and I think that goes some way to explaining why children’s books are so very special!

Thank you for taking the time to read my ramble! Another thank you to Anna for having me, I hope she is having a lovely time of her well-earned break!

Jem xXx

Oh Jem, you write so poetically about the wonders of these childhood delights! A whole world within each, with many more memories besides. I'm off to lovingly stroke my Enid Blyton collection. Thank you for sharing your lovely collection with us.