venta

Aren't secondhand bookshops brilliant ?

I recently (well, a few weeks ago) finished reading a lovely little hardback edition of A Passage To India, which had a small sticker on its front proclaiming that it had cost me but forty of your English pence. It wasn't at all the book I was expecting, not least because it turns out that EM Forster wasn't an elderly spinster when she wrote it (she was, among other things, a bloke). Why did I think EM Forster was female ?

Having read various books about British India avidly, this actually made an interesting change. Most go for the easy option of painting the British as out-and-out bastards who walked all over the natives out of sheer merciless belief in their own superiority. I'm not trying to defend the British (some of their actions were inexcusable) but A Passage To India does present a worm's eye view of the case on both sides.

Not a case for the occupation, but just for the attitudes held by the ordinary people of both sides during their day-to-day existence. Parts of the story are told from the viewpoints of different Indian and British residents, and more than anything else the reader starts to experience the sheer frustration that each felt with the other. Not through malice, or deliberate intent to offend, but just brutal cultural difference and complete lack of comprehension of the other's mentality, leading ultimately to bafflement and contempt. Accordingly, it is not always a very comfortable book.

However, all this preamble is just me trying to sound like I have something to say when really I only want to ask a question about typefaces. Oh yes, only the finest thrills and spills on this LJ.

I remember, aged about seven, asking my mother what the funny squiggles in my copy of The Circus Is Coming were. Whenever an s or a c preceded a t a strange curlicue joined the two. My mother, I think, dismissed it as an outdated typographical twiddle, and I promptly forgot about it.

Then my A Passage To India did it too. Look:

What is it, and what's it doing there ? It's like highly selective serifs on steroids. Does it have a name ? I'm quite prepared to believe that it's a harmless and outmoded twiddle, but... why ? Are there any other similar things?

My other recent discovery among books I bought cheaply in secondhand shops is Manalive, by GK Chesterton. It's delightful, and Chesterton was a Discordian ahead of his time. If you're feeling at all jaded with life, read it. Unless you're one of those people who tend to pick holes in plots, in which case don't, because it's a very elaborate set-piece of a plot, built up, despite its unlikelihood, to make a point. And at times it doesn't quite hang together credibly. And I fell in love with it, so I don't want to hear people ripping into it just yet :)

Also, if anyone has a clue where my copy has gone, I'd like to know. It's an orange penguin and, like the book's central character, it seems to have slid away while no one was looking.