pumpkinstrokemarrow

Having been treated to a run of TLS's not containing much of interest to me, a few weeks ago I thought to buy an LRB for a change, the LRB already noticed in fact on the 1st and 15th March, and did rather well, this issue containing about a dozen articles of 2-3 pages each, each loosely keyed to a book or two. And as luck would have it, over half the articles were of interest to me. So as well as articles about banks and Homer already mentioned, we had amongst other morsels the workings of our new supreme court, Prince Albert, and Russian politics. The only really odd piece was a couple of pages about whether some 15th century Florentine painter of whom I had not previously heard was a murderer. I completely failed to work up any interest in the matter.

Encouraged, bought another last week. Same format but did not do so well, despite rather depressing pieces about the Negev (where Israel seems to be tidying away the Bedouins who live there) and Syria. Not so much of interest at all. But there was compensation in the form of an advertisement for a deluxe, limited edition of 'The Chemistry of Tears' by Peter Carey. A very deluxe one for £295 and a not so deluxe one for £180. Plus a warning that if you order lots, your order might be scaled down. Now I am quite keen on books and am quite easily put off by what I regard as a bad bit of book production or design. But I have never been terribly keen on deluxe books, with those from the Folio Society not scoring very well at all, although to be fair to them they are not charging £200 a pop either.

So I was amused to see this advertisement for a fancy consumer product in what I have always thought of as a rather lefty magazine. Nothing wrong with lefties wanting nice things, but this particular sort of nice thing does not, to me anyway, fit very well. They should be putting arty photographs of the battles of the miners' strike on their walls, not arty books on their coffee tables.