Forgotten treasures

[sartorias]

While sorting and tossing my early notebooks, I usually note titles I read and loved. Many I've utterly forgotten, and some I remember but the Suck Fairy has waved the Wand of Guano over them. But once in a while I hit a title and get this flash of whoa, I remember that! One I'd checked out repeatedly from our library was Doris Sutcliffe Adams' No

Comments

[whswhs]

Oh, I know that feeling. I read two juveniles by Lee Correy [G. Harry Stine] back in the fifties/early sixties: Starship through Space, which is the first place I encountered the idea that hyperspace looks like your visual blind spot; and Rocket Man, which was largely about the schooling needed to work on interplanetary vehicles (one of the places I got my love of that sort of fiction). Now their cost is in the hundreds and there's no way I could justify the purchase. I don't really understand what's preventing the publication of new editions; the Heinlein and Norton juveniles I read at the same time seem still to be in print, mostly. . . .

[sartorias]

Yeah--someone somewhere needs to see these, get the rights. You'd think that cruising listings and seeing old titles go for thumping high sums would be a hint, but I know so little about the mysteries of marketing.

[ext_3197821]

Grace Ingram? As a teenager, I took her book, Red Adam's Lady (1973) out of the library repeatedly. I loved it. She also wrote Gilded Spurs (1979) which wasn't bad. Now I will have to track down somehow No Man's Son. Thanks! There's a review here of the book and the comments have some information on her: http://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-b-reviews/draft-red-adams-lady-by-grace-ingram/

[sartorias]

Thanks! Oh, gosh, that last commend, by her gardener, is incredibly sad.

Thriftbooks

[patty1943]

You could type the author and title in on Thriftbooks.com
and if they don't have it, add it to your wishlist on Thriftbooks. They send me a notice every few weeks of the ones on my wishlist that have shown up. If you spend more than $10, shipping is free.

Re: Thriftbooks

[sartorias]

Thanks for the suggestion!

[sovay]

In my memory, it's right up there with Mara, Daughter of the Nile, which finally saw reprint and discovery by a whole new generation.

I hadn't realized! Nice. My mother had a first edition which I read as a child, along with Rita Ritchie's The Golden Hawks of Genghis Khan (1958) and Ice Falcon (1963) and Nan Denker's The Bound Girl (1957) and other now-obscure historical children's fiction. I can't include Rosemary Sutcliff in this list because I grew up and discovered that many people I knew had also imprinted on The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), plus she goes in and out of print with regularity. I had never heard of Doris Sutcliffe Adams, but I will look for her in libraries.

If I had discretionary income, I would so start up a press and hunt down these sorts of books and get them out again!

See if you can get the rights to Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), while we're dreaming. It's very difficult for me to recommend that book to everyone when it only exists in libraries or for unthinkable amounts on eBay.

[sartorias]

No wonder it's one I've never read. *sigh*

[sovay]

No wonder it's one I've never read.

It's her best and her least-known novel for children; it is my favorite of hers. I read it frequently as a small child and then tracked it down again after a hiatus of decades in 2005 and about six years ago my cousins actually found me a copy without mortgaging their firstborn, which still impresses me. It has deeply mythic imagery and a breathtaking sense of the numinous and I don't choke on the Christianity the way I do in some of her other books. If you can find it anywhere, I recommend it. rushthatspeaks has written about it in more detail.

[sartorias]

Oh, I've got to find it. I found her Christianity a plus as it was inclusive, as I recall, rather than exclusive. (It's been some years since I read Goudge--they are hard to find.)

[6_penny]

I just found a copy for $75 on Amazon!
Gouge does magical rooms so well. And the fresco in Pilgrims Inn, and the Holly hedge enclosure still haunt my mind's eye.