I didn't discover Andre Norton until I became a children's librarian - about the same time as the first seven Witch World novels were issued in hardback in the UK (for the YA market over here, though not YA in the USA, I think). I read and re-read those seven books then went back and read her books for younger readers. This was pre-google, of course. Pocket calculators were still a novelty, computers of 1k capacity filled whole rooms, and Amazon was decades away. It was impossible to get hold of a lot of Witch World titles in the UK in the 1970s, but much later - in the 90s, when I started to sing my way around the USA and Canada with Artisan - I made sure that in my spare time between gigs I visited as many bookshops as I could. A Canadian friend introduced me to 'The World's Biggest' and the specialist 'Bakka' in Toronto and I began to fill in the blanks in my Andre Norton collection. For collection it has become. I bought every title I could find over the years of travelling and I confess still haven't read them all, but I look forward to that pleasure yet to come.
She guided my reading and influenced my writing, probably more than any other single author.
She guided my reading and influenced my writing, probably more than any other single author.
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