Saturday 8 May 2010

Elizabeth Taylor Acquisitions


I've done rather well with Elizabeth Taylor over the last couple of weeks. Shortly before Easter, Sophie from Virago sent me the latest VMC, The soul of kindness (number 552) Virago are slowly reissuing the Elizabeth Taylor novels which I think is fantastic as they definitely deserve to reach a new audience. However, I am a big fan of the original green editions of the VMCs and am slowly acquiring a set of them - I spotted these two pristine books, Angel and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremount, two of her best works in my opionion, in Oxfam last week. I now have 5 of them; it will be a slow process to collect them as I am resisting buying them from Amazon, and just looking out for them in charity shops. Finally, I did treat myself with some birthday money to the 30th Anniversary hardback of A game of hide and seek. Lovely!

I have already read all of Taylor's books, so I am not quite sure about how I will blog about them, but I am looking forward to having a look at all of the different covers used.

(I have acquired some other VMCs since I last did an Acquisitions post, which you can read about on my other blog here...)

11 comments:

  1. They look lovely. They are not by the actress Elizabeth Taylor though, are they?

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  2. I recently read Palladian which was quite an unusual book.It is the only Elizabeth Taylor novel that I have read and I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

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  3. What a wonderful blog!

    My mother had an English bookstore in Stockholm which carried almost all of the Virago Modern Classics-titles. When the shop went out of business, she took the all the Virago books home. They have a special place in my heart - and my bookshelf! :)

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  4. Vivienne - no, she is "The other Elizabeth Taylor" - Nicola Beaumann has written a biography of Taylor, the writer, under that title! A fascinating read! There is another Elisabeth Taylor Virago too, Elisabeth Russell Taylor!

    TeaLady - I am a big fan of the Taylor novels and 5recommend that you read some more. Angel is fascinating!

    Sara - thanks! How absolutely amazing! How many do you have?

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  5. I just did a quick count - about 75. My sister and I got to share all the doubles.

    Do you have all of the titles?

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  6. Definitely not - I probably have about 100? No idea - will count up tonight!!

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  7. I have 159, but I did get rid of a couple that I didn't want to read again, and I have some duplicates where I have the more modern edition and then picked up a green copy! There are now over 550 titles - I have read nearly half, the others have been loaned to me or came from the library.

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  8. That's impressive! I haven't even read a quarter of the titles that I've got. I guess I've got some reading to do... :)

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  9. I read Angel recently and loved it. My copy had a still from the movie on the cover. I'd never heard of it being filmed, I think it was maybe straight to DVD.

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  10. I think it was only released in the Netherlands or something strange like that!

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