Virtual browsing, or, The torture of distance

A couple of months ago, the wonderful picture below was emailed to me by Tina Brooker—who has, by the way, already been responsible for adding dozens of wonderfully obscure authors to my Overwhelming List as a result of her perusals of E-bay listings, book advertisements, tables of contents, and more.  (And let me say right off, trust me, you owe it to yourself to view the photo at full size.  Don't waste time arguing, just do it!)

The Old Station Pottery and Bookshop, courtesy of David Brooker

Tina's husband David took the pic at the Old Station Pottery and Bookshop in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk.  It's wonderfully high-resolution and I found several new (to me) authors to add to my list merely by indulging in some delightful browsing in this enticing shop.  Indeed, it's the next best thing to visiting Wells-next-the-Sea myself (though who knows, perhaps I'll do that too someday—have a look at some of the lovely photos here.)  But admittedly it is rather tantalizing, for what I wouldn't give to be able to take down some of the books and page through them, get a "feel" for them, literally and figuratively.

Of course, I thanked Tina enthusiastically (and got her and her husband's gracious permission to post the picture here), Then, only a few weeks later, they made their way to Peters Bookshop in Sheringham (which seems to have had a website at one time, but the site is redirecting me to a t-shirt shop now, which doesn't really help us much for the purpose at hand, does it?).  In lieu of an official pic of the shop, here's a Google Streetview shot of it:

Peters Bookshop exterior (courtesy of Google)

David again brought his camera along and snapped these two luscious pics of some of the shelves. First, the top two shelves:

from Peters Bookshop, courtesy of David Brooker

Oh, what a lovely array of obscure writers.  And the whole array could have been selected for its relevance to this blog.  There's Florence Barclay, Ethel M. Dell, Mabel Barnes-Grundy, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Marie Corelli, Maud Diver, and more.  And then there are those I wasn't familiar with.  Isabel Cameron?  I've discovered that she was a Scottish author early in my time period, but details will have to await further research.

And then the lower shelves, which, it turned out, offered a veritable wealth of hitherto-unknown authors:

from Peters Bookshop, courtesy of David Brooker

Here's Flora Klickmann, L. T Meade, Doris Pocock, and many other recognizable names.  But also, Hilda T. Skae?  Amy Le Feuvre?  Mary Catharine Rowsell?  Jennie Chappell?  Grace Pettman?  Ah, what a wealth of material for future research, and an extensive future update to my Overwhelming List.  And then there's Amy Whipple.  Any connection to Dorothy?  Probably not, but I shall certainly have to look more closely.

Well, I confess these pics distracted me for at least a couple of hours from work I really should have been doing, and they very nearly made me throw caution (and all notion of fiscal or other responsibility) to the wind and jet off to England for a good few weeks of book shopping (rapidly followed, no doubt, by more or less utter financial ruin). How many such bookshops might there be in the entire U.K.? And how long might it take to visit them all?  Well, I'm game, regardless.

So thank you again to Tina and David for allowing me to vicariously share their book browsing.

Clearly David has set the standard with these pics.  But if anyone else feels up to the challenge of enabling some similarly tantalizing virtual browsing in one of their favorite second-hand shops, by all means forward your pics along!