Skip to main content

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.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3FiFT8O
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more