Étagères - bookshelves fit for Masterpieces

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We recently took a mid-week break in one of our more prestigious hotels and among the facilities I spotted on arrival was a small library space but with expansive shelves.

Books!

Forget about the spa; a reading nook is my pamper place. Getting absorbed in a book is something that I really enjoy and what a delight it was to find these volumes from the Masterpiece Library of Short Stories.  Naturally I picked the one marked FRENCH - Volumes 3 and 4. 

Just look at this contents page.




Wouldn't you be tempted to spend an hour or two? 

Well, I was and that's just what I did.  It was time well spent.

What a labour of love it must have been for editor Sir JA Hammerton  He and his board of eminent critics worked under the auspices of The Educational Book Company to compile these volumes of stories across countries and time periods. The books, dating from the early twentieth century, naturally show signs of age, wear and tear but those stories are timeless.

Here's a thing about books on show.  Some hospitality outlets display them as decoration and may even have bought them in by the metre to fill shelf space. I have even seen books cut in half vertically to better fit a narrow space! Not these ones. With comfortable armchairs, sofas and lighting these books were meant to be browsed, lifted down and read.

And speaking of hospitality...the short story I read at leisure was Saint Julian the Hospitaller by Gustave Flaubert.  I had read it years ago and it is simply an astonishing piece of 20 odd pages. I could have read on picking from George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Alphonse Daudet - who figures prominently in the collection - and Émile Zola. 

So many to choose from but hotel stays end and the books must stay. 

Still, those stories need reading and so I went in search of copies online, finding them in all their varying conditions of wear and price ranges.
 
I did.  A copy of those short stories Volumes 3 and 4 headed my way and I am enormously pleased with my purchase.

I have space on a shelf and a comfortable chair.


Bonne lecture !

























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