From my friend Jess, I received for my birthday a slender volume of Virgina Woolf essays and short stories released this year as Street Haunting.
The name of this little book is taken from the title of a piece within - 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure'.
The story goes a little like this:
... so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: 'Really I must buy a pencil,' as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter - rambling the streets of London.
The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful.
The 'champagne brightness of the air'? Kill me now. This entire piece is just too lovely. Its central concerns are those of the flâneur: one who wanders the streets and discovers all manner of oddities and wonders simply by being awake to the city.
What is additionally compulsive, though, is that this little book is part of the splash-tacular series of tiny, wee books released (or in some cases re-released) by Penguin to mark the publishing house's 70th birthday.
These books appeal to the part of me that likes lollies, I think. They're small and bright and tasty. Just morsel-sized. I love books, but I do not take them as seriously as some. I will never make a capital-C Collector: I have no desire to put Mylar 'round covers or to talk of the foxing and spotting of pages or clipped or unclipped dustjackets.
Instead, I think I love books as a four year-old loves TV: messily, and with the rather substantial chance that chocolate's gonna get spilled.
There is a super-dooper Flash thingo at Penguin's Happy Birthday site that is colourful and very much for playing with! Click on any of the spines, and the book pops out at you, as if being taken from a shelf and you can see the cover and read an extract. The covers in particular are very cute and graphic. Each artist was given only seven days to come up with the design, so they're punchy, but also have a sense of having been done on the fly.
Penguin also have a list of 70 reasons why one should wish them a happy birthday. Some of the 70 are fab, such as:
54. Because after being kidnapped and held in solitary confinement in war-torn Beirut, Terry Waite sketched a penguin as a way of asking his captors for some good books to read - and was understood.
Some are more of the lame-ola variety, though:
27. Because Penguin is the home of reading.
The absolute corker for top-notch piece of trivia may well be this one:
26. Because early Penguins were available from a dispenser called the 'Penguincubator'.
Penguincubator? I want me one of those!
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