The Daily Mail reports that E Nesbit copied parts of The Railway Children from The House by the Railway by Ada J Graves.
Graves is a very obscure writer. AbeBooks has only five copies of her books and no copies of The House by the Railway.
E Nesbit died in 1924 so she’s probably not too bothered by this story.
I spotted this 24 hours too late but the Wall Street Journal has a feature about Irish writer Flann O’Brien, also known as Brian O’Nolan and Myles na gCopaleen. Ahh…the drink again! A familiar story.
Every prominent Irish writer from the mid-1930s until O’Brien’s death in 1966—on April Fool’s Day, yet—saw him drunk. Nuala O’Faolain was the last, writing in her acclaimed 1996 memoir “Are You Somebody?” that she “saw Myles na gCopaleen urinate against the counter in Neary’s one night.”
It’s always fascinating to trawl through the signed books that are available on AbeBooks. We found a wide selection of books signed by famous pop stars, rock stars, and country singers too. Our list ranges from Neil Young to three members of the Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton, Sting (his autobiography, Broken Music, is pictured right) Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. I love the title of Davey Jones’ autobiography – They Made a Monkee Out of Me.
I’ve read Chronicles by Bob Dylan and it’s not a bad book at all. Not sure I’d go for the Donny Osmond book myself…See the list.
February was a bumper month with several books standing out on our list of most expensive sales. A first edition of The Camels Are Coming by W.E. Johns, the first Biggles’ novel from 1932, was sold for $17,754 (almost £11,000). The Biggles series of aeronautical adventures spanned nearly 100 novels and features many different phases in the career of British flying ace John Bigglesworth (aka Biggles). The books go from his early days growing up in India, to fighting in World Wars I and II, and through to the Cold War era. First editions of The Camels Are Coming are scarce.
Of course, the ‘Camels’ are Sopwith Camels – the British World War I single-seat fighter plane that helped to revolutionize aerial warfare.
It’s also fascinating to see the continued interest A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. An unread copy of the first edition, first printing, of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel sold for $7,500. It was published in 1980 – only 7,500 copies of this printing were produced. As so often before, there was also a copy of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger on the list.
See the most expensive sales for February.
A man, and a former homeless man at that, has been shortlisted for a major romance writing prize. Tom Gamble, who slept rough in London and now lives in Paris, has been acclaimed by the Romantic Novelists’ Association for his debut novel, Amazir.
