The Trip:

* Chiltern Hills and Thames Valley (to mystery lovers, aka "Midsomer County" -- though given that this is an area chock-full of quintessential(ly) English villages, it's no surprise that it also routinely provides locations for other series, such as Inspector Morse, The Vicar of Dibley, and of course, adaptations of Agatha Christie's mysteries ... Christie herself, after all, also spent her last years in this area, in a village just outside of Wallingford, where she is also buried.)

* Chawton: Jane Austen's home

* Gloucester and Malmesbury

* The Welsh Borderland: The Welsh Marches, Herefordshire, and Shropshire

* Bosworth and Leicester

* East Anglia: Norfolk, Ely, and Stour Valley (aka [John] Constable Country)

The Souvenirs:

* Jane Austen:

- Pride and Prejudice -- an imitation leather-bound miniature copy of the book's first edition

- Lady Susan -- audio version performed, inter alia, by Harriet Walter

- Teenage Writings (including, inter alia, Cassandra, Love and Freindship, and The History of England)

* Terry Townsend: Jane Austen's Hampshire (gorgeously illustrated hardcover)

* Hugh Thomson:

- Illustrations to Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion

- Illustrations to Mansfield Park and Emma

* Pen Vogler: Tea with Jane Austen

... plus other Austen-related bits, such as a playing card set featuring Hugh Thomson's illustrations for Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, two Austen first edition refrigerator magnets, two "Austen 200" designer pens, a Chawton wallpaper design notepad, and a set of Austen-related postcards.

* Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe
* Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love

(have read bits of pieces of both, but never yet the whole thing(s) -- something to be remedied soonish)

* Margaret Sanders (ed.):

- Letters of England's Queens

- Letters of England's Kings

("Queens" looks decidedly more interesting, but I figured since there were both volumes there ... Unfortunately, neither contains any Plantagenet correspondence, though; they both start with the Tudors.)

* Terry Jones: Medieval Lives

* Ian Mortimer:

- The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ruler of England 1327-1330

- 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory

* Chris Skidmore: Bosworth -- The Birth of the Tudors

* David Baldwin: Richard III

* Richard Hayman: The Tudor Reformation

* Glyn E. German: Welsh History

(The last two are decidedly more on the "outline" side, but they're useful as fast, basic references)

* Martin Gayford: Constable in Love -- the painter John Constable, that is.

* Andrea Wulf: The Invention of Nature (yeah, I know, late to the party, but anyway ... and at least I got the edition with the black cover!)

* Chris Beardshaw: 100 Plants that almost changed the World (as title and cover imply, nothing too serious, but a collection of interesting tidbits nevertheless)

* Niall Ferguson: The House of Rothschild -- The World's Banker, 1849-1999

* Michael Jecks, Knights Templar:

- The Leper's Return

- The Boy-Bishop's Glovemaker

- The Devil's Acolyte

- The Chapel of Bones

- The Butcher of St. Peter's

- The Malice of Unnatural Death

* Shirley McKay: Hue & Cry (a mystery set in Jacobean St. Andrews, Scotland)

... and finally, two present-day mystery/thrillers, just to balance off (well, not really, but anyway ...) all that history:

* Jo Nesbø: The Snowman

* Michael Connelly: The Late Show
 

... plus several more mugs for my collection (because I clearly don't own enough of those yet), two Celtic knot bookmarks, a Celtic knot T-shirt, a Celic knot pin, a Celtic knot designer pen (can you tell I really like Celtic knot designs?), assorted handmade soaps and lavender sachets, and assorted further postcards and sticky notes, plus in-depth guidebooks of pretty much every major place I visited (which guidebooks I sent ahead by mail before leaving England, so they're currently still en route to my home).

ETA:

Oh, and then there's John le Carré's The Pigeon Tunnel, which I bought at the airport right before my departure and am currently reading.  Books that you buy at the departure for a trip do qualify for a vacation book haul, don't they?

Merken

Merken

Merken

Merken

Merken

Merken

... minus the book festival, but anyway.  Book town writ large.

So there I was, nicely pacing myself (read: trying hard at least not to enter every single book store I was passing) --

... but then this happened, and my self-control was toast:

I left the store with, among other things, the better part of Michael Jecks's Knights Templar series (to the extent I haven't already read it, that is, obviously) and a few other books in addition.

"Chalky," the murder victim chalk outline figure lying so conveniently at the bottom of the True Crime section, was taken about town by a local artist, incidentally (I'd have paid anything for postcards of these images, but there weren't any, so I had to content myself with taking photos of photos):

Oh, and just in case you're wondering, like pretty much every self-respecting town in the Welsh borderland Hay-on-Wye does have a castle, too, and true to form it did get razed (or nearly, anyway) a couple of times in the various Welsh-English wars and in the English Civil War ... but who needs a castle when you have book stores?!  (It's intended to be made another book-related fixture of the town, though, so that should be interesting.)

Last but not least and for the sake of visual context: This is what you drive through on your way to booktown central.

Merken

Merken

Merken

Merken

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Colin Robinson in The New York Times laments about how we as a society are finding it harder and harder to focus on reading and on good books.  He attributes this to the overwhelming number of books being produced and the failing institutions where you might be able to find suggestions on what books to be reading (i.e. the library, the brick book store, the book reviewer).

I, being a bit of a purist, tend to lean with Mr. Robinson’s point of view on this.  I think the new media outlet options of iPads, iPhones, Kiddles, Nooks, iBooks, and other assorted digital readers are great for portability and opening the reading world to, possibly, a new set of readers.  This comes with price though.  With digital reducing the prices in book (which is a good thing) we start losing the “brick and mortar” stores, libraries are becoming used less and less, and with the failing of the print newspaper, they are cutting back in areas and one of them is for the book reviewer, who can also be replaced by all the reviews that are listed on the web page, which can be easily manipulated by either supporters of the authors or, more likely, the publishing companies.

I will diverge a bit from Mr. Robinson’s conclusions when he says, “Overall book sales have been anemic in recent years, declining 6 percent in the first half of 2013 alone.”  I would pose this question; there has been a (unnecessarily) prolonged fiscal crisis in our country with a high number of unemployed, how much of that decline is due to people cutting back on their entertainment budgets?