Nice finds Markyboy, Batemans is a great place. Could you let us know how 'You are not Sparrows' reads. I looked at buying it before and I think it concerns flying in Iraq. Also there aren't too many memoirs out there with a Wapiti on the cover Scott
I'm running out of books while visiting my parents for a week, so I visited the War Museum volunteers' book sale. I'm very pleased even if The Last Battle doesn't cover the first two weeks of April. The red book is We Landed in Sicily and Italy: a Story of the Devons (1943!!) who I see now were part of the Malta Brigade. If anyone has a recommendation on which to read first, please let me know
My latest arrivals. Starting on the Taylor now. The East Timor book I am going to read as a primer to the upcoming publication of the first volume of the Australian Official History of the ADF's involvement in INTERFET.
Really dialled back the book buying this year, but a couple of quid for an English language version of one of those French album style things is hard to resist, even if outside my main areas of interest.
Looking through some of these posts, I can't help thinking of this: From (hardly my favourite source of news): Tom Gauld on the archaeology of the book tower – cartoon
Dennis Wheatley is probably best known for books like "The Devil Rides Out". He'd fought at the Somme as an artillery officer in WW1, but was invalided out after being hit with chlorine at Passchendaele. I picked this up a few days ago, to add to my own teetering piles. Early in WW2 Wheatley bagged a job with Joint Planning Staff, where he was tasked with, among other things, imagining he was a German planner writing plans to defeat Britain and ways in which these plans could be countered. He got the job after writing a 7,000 word paper for an M.I.5 Captain who'd been given this task, but had told his driver, who happened to be Wheatley's wife, that he was basically a policemen and this work was beyond him. Wheatley's 7,000 words filtered through to senior staff. The book contains a lot of the papers he wrote for the Joint Planning Staff - read by Churchill - and makes good reading, although with the benefit of hindsight some of his proposals seem unrealistic - but he had tasked with using his imagination. The hardback replaced the paperback I lost years ago, whose cover looked like this: The hardback has the advantage of a few fold out maps, and I'm a sucker for maps - the one below is how Wheatley, writing in 1940, thought Europe should be divided after Britain had won to provide a strong buffer beween a reduced Germany and a reduced France.
I had a great find in one of my local charity shops yesterday. Not only got a very good book for a grand total of £2.00 (book was only £1.29 but I thought that I would generous ) but when I got outside I noticed that it had been signed by John Wingate and dedicated to a fellow submariner. Well chuffed with that.
The Fall of Singapore – 90 Days: November 1941 – February 1942 Tracked a copy of this monster down. There is a paperback version at 161 pages but the 744 page version is very interesting for the photographs of those lost and the day by day coverage.
I know, I should have bought them years ago....and my problem is that with Owen and his mates on strike, I might not see them for Christmas...but I received an e-mail from The Tank Museum today. "Your edition of British Military Transport & Moving the Guns is here! Great news: British Military Transport & Moving The Guns by David Fletcher & Philip Ventham have been delivered to The Tank Museum. We are working hard to get your order to you as swiftly as possible. Please note, due to Royal Mail strikes, shipping may take longer than usual. Thank you for your support for this project."
This new book, available from amazon, may be of interest to some of the membership. I have just ordered it.
I found hardback copies of The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (twenty-five cents) and Kruschev Remembers ($2, covers WW2 era) at an animal shelter gift shop. From the former I learned that physical abuse (Sr. Private beats up new private, Corporal beats up Sr. Private and so on, so forth) of recruits in Russia today goes back to Tsarist Russia. Haven't opened Kruschev's book yet.
Nice library and nice camouflage. I need to build 8 more shelves and then a bookcase for oversized books. I learned to do stained glass last month and instead of wood panel or glass panel doors can now do stained glass doors. Recently I ordered Nick Strobel's Old Gunsights and Scopes along with Truman Hendson's Sporting Rifles and Scope Sights - How to Build Them. The latter (how to build scopes) was something that was taught in American high schools in the '50s and was long abandoned as part of the cirriculum. My uncle was taught that stuff and they used surplus glass salvaged off US military scopes that were dismantled.
Bought almost no AFV books this year, being slightly swamped with the things & more inclined to throw my money at tools that generate income, but my brother might have caused a dilemma thereof with his present. I mean... I know there are collected bound books of the old Profile series, but it'd be kind of nice to gradually collect them all. Not much rubbish among them really. Sigh. Though... Having just googled the prices being charged by some f@*kers on ebay etc., I suspect this might be a very gradual Charity shop process... FFS. LibraryThing listing goes up to 65. Profile AFV | LibraryThing Bugger...