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The book I got for Christmas: ‘Even the cover was terrifying’

Continuing our series of Guardian writers revealing their most memorable gift books, David Barnett remembers how Usborne’s The World of the Unknown: Ghosts scared him for years

  • Please share your most memorable bookish presents below and we will publish a selection later this week

Christmas when I was a child was always about Event Books. Not paperback novels; those would be bought after Christmas with the book tokens I always received both on the big day and for my January birthday, feasting on the gems in the January sale at Smiths in Wigan – not WH, but an independent, family-owned bookshop.

But under the tree would be big rectangular packages – the requisite comic book annuals, of course, and occasionally the Guinness Book of Records, but also a big old hardback book, often obtained cheap from remaindered shops, obscure volumes of science fiction or fantasy art with a nominal narrative thread loosely connecting the images, or Reader’s Digest explorations of uncanny phenomena.

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