Is it in the Oxford English Dictionary? Well perhaps not yet but it should be.
Snippateering (and I felt that extra 'p' added something) surely an art and a skill deserving of recognition.
For want of a newspaper there are times when all would be lost in this house, so you have no idea how often I have had to defend this stack with my life in recent weeks when the needs of the reluctant fire or the puppy's very willing derriere seemed paramount.
Resistant to all pleadings I suggest chopping up the furniture or putting the puppy in nappies, but just hands off my paper reviews.
We buy several, and though I know I can read them online at leisure, there seems nothing to match that crumply old folded paper version draped over the teapot, plus I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to cuttings and paper reviews folded up and put inside books.
Imagine my delight when this copy of Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, picked up at a book fair for £5, yielded rich pickings. I love this book, inscribed "For Hilary From Kenneth Christmas 1953", sounds formal doesn't it, and I presume it is Hilary who has written notes in it. I've added my marginalia and I really hope whoever this book moves onto eventually continues the tradition even though it is a first edition with a Vanessa Bell cover, it's a much used, much loved book, not an exhibit or an investment.
Several of the cuttings predate the book so I think Hilary was a real fan of Virginia Woolf. Tucked in there, Desmond MacCarthy's review of a book entitled Virginia Woolf : Her Art as a Novelist by Joan Bennett, published by Cambridge University Press and priced 6/-
'It is rather embarrassing to a reviewer when the publisher's account of a new book is as good a review of it as he could write himself...quote from it I must, for there, concisely stated, is what I want most to say myself...'
Desmond MacCarthy I discover was the literary critic for The Sunday Times back in the 1940s and also in this little batch Hilary has kept a stellar piece by him on book reviewing and criticism,
'good critics are much rarer than good poets, dramatists or novelists...'
more of that another day.
We can eke out the weekend newspapers to last a whole week of fire lighting here if we are very careful. There's a set order to these things too, Business, Work, Money and Sport sections will usually see us warm through to Wednesday by which time I've hidden the review section in my stash awaiting attention. Travel and Property go up in smoke on Thursday swiftly followed by the main papers which we can make last two days and then it's time to buy more.
A box of firelighters probably a whole lot cheaper.
Naturally this all went to pot with a puppy indoors and we were through the whole lot by Monday with firelighting eyes gazing furtively at my snippateering box.
Along the way I pause to catch up on things I've missed and then there are the little dilemmas, which to keep when there are must-have reviews on both sides of the same page,
After a lot or procrastination and sidetracking I end up with this
and then begins that leisurely wander around the shelves finding the books to put them in and more browsing.... you really would think I had nothing better to do.
Is it just me or do I have kindred snippateers out there?
Recent Comments