A Sense Of Shelf

Shelf has proved a flat and uninspiring subject matter for our Dead Good blogging collective this week. Not even the person who nominated the topic has managed to write about it ;-(

You know by now that I am not one to baulk at a challenge, but I do feel the pressure is on to make this post as novel and diverting as possible, so it's going to take the form of a sleuthing quiz. How exciting is that, Cluedo fans? (I sense the buzz...) Everyone into the library immediately!

Have you ever, when you've walked into someone's house for the first time, taken a discreet (or even more blatant) look through that person's record collection or bookshelves and wittingly or not used the information to help form your opinion of them? It's tempting, isn't it? I know I've done it many times. (As an aside, would it surprise you to learn that Boris Johnson's new right-hand maniac - sorry, senior advisor - one Dominic Cummings, has a soft spot for the writings of Otto von Bismark? We should all be very worried.)

Okay, here's how the sleuthing quiz works. I've chosen six well-known household names, and I've made a series of informed assumptions about the books, specifically novels, one might expect to find on their bookshelves. (I was going to select the individuals using the Acton Impulse random decision maker, naturally, only it appears to have broken down.) Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read those six lists of books and then use your skill and judgement (and such clues as you might have picked up into how your Saturday Blogger's mind works) to identify correctly the individuals by sense of shelf.

A Sense Of Shelf

To give you a sporting chance, for it is Saturday after all, I'll tell you upfront those six well-known characters are:      (a) Reverend Green, (b) Colonel Mustard, (c) Mrs Peacock, (d) Professor Plum, (e) Miss Scarlet and (f) Mrs White. They should all be names you are familiar with, I think. The rest is up to you - just match the individual to the shelf. Happy sleuthing (but watch out for red herrings). The shelves (numbered 1 to 6 obviously) include, among other titles, the following:

1: Cider With Rosie (Laurie Lee)/ My Family And Other Animals (Gerald Durrell)/ Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)

2: Whip Hand (Dick Francis)/ Greenmantle (John Buchan)/ The Murder At The Vicarage (Agatha Christie)

3: Appassionata (Jilly Cooper)/ Mapp and Lucia (E.F. Benson)/ Random Harvest (James Hilton)

4: Where Eagles Dare (Alistair MacLean)/ Mr. Weston's Good Wine (T.F. Powys)/ The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

5: Harnessing Peacocks (Mary Wesley)/ Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)/ Snowdrops (A.D. Miller)

6: Vanity Fair (William Thackeray)/ The Trumpet-Major (Thomas Hardy)/ The Vicar of Wakefield (Oliver Goldsmith)

That's it. Once you've got them all paired up to your satisfaction you can check on the answers below, after today's new work, a 'found' poem of sorts, constructed around phrases beloved of the sellers of second-hand books when describing their wares.

Shelf(ish)
Pre-loved and therefore
as one might expect,
a little spotting and tanning
commensurate with age,
some creasing of the spine
and other signs of wear
as slightly scuffed edges,
light soiling in places,
occasional wine-glass stain,
dirty remarks in the margins -
though otherwise tightly bound
and contents reasonably sound.
Still, eminently serviceable copy
in fact, with all intact,
just probably not suitable
as present material.
P.S. jacket missing and note -
stock image may not
match the actuality...

...in other words:
has done the rounds, been surplus
to requirements for years
and is growing old and fusty
in a second-hand bookstore
with his name in gold antiqua
above the rarely opened door.

Finally, the answers to the literary cluedo are as follows:
1=e, 2=b, 3=c, 4=a, 5=f, 6=d How did you do?

Thanks for putting up with my outpourings, S ;-)