Welcome to "Man with two dogs" - the family website for dog owners and dog walkers.
This is my countryside diary which appears each Saturday in the Dundee Courier newspaper.
Bookworm
November 7th, 2009
OLD BOOKS can get like a fever. Earlier in the week I went to a charity book fair. I had an idea of the sort of houses the books came from and hoped I might find something by wildlife photographer and writer Seton Gordon who, in his day, was Scotland's foremost naturalist. Or pick up someone's discards of one of my favourite writers, Violet Jacob, or sometime Ferryden resident Peter Anson, who wrote so fondly and descriptively about the east of Scotland fisher folk.
I could see nothing by any of these authors but I still came home well pleased. From a titled Mearns house came a copy of The Smugglers' by Duncan Fraser, historian turned publisher/owner of the now defunct Montrose Standard Press, who I remember well. We have a copy of the book already, but his books are a bit like gold dust to those who know his writing on north-east history.
TS Cairncross struck a chord. A little research reminded me that he was one-time minister in Langholm, in the Borders, and had been mentor to Christopher Murray Grieve, aka Scottish poet and patriot Hugh MacDiarmid, who worked for a time in the 1920s as a journalist on the Montrose Review newspaper.
Cairncross's anthology The Scot at Hame' contributes to the poetic narrative of Scottish life produced by early 20th century provincial poets like Dr David Rorie (The Auld Doctor and other poems and songs), WD Cocker (Dandie and other poems) and Charles Murray in Hamewith'. King Solomon's Ring' is one of two books written with deep insight into animal behaviour by Austrian psychologist Konrad Lorenz. I shall enjoy reading it because its companion book Man Meets Dog' was a useful reference for dog behaviour when I was writing the Scottish best seller Sea Dog Bamse' with Andrew Orr.
Irish poet Patrick MacGill was new to me but I was attracted by the pick and shovel engraved in gold on the cover of his Songs of The Dead End'. He came from the poorest origins in Donegal, on Ireland's north coast, and by dint of single-minded determination he became a writer. His narrative poetry reminds me of Robert Service's Songs of a Sourdough'.
We'll have fun with the grandchildren reading about Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls', an anthology of poems about mischievous children. As it says in the inside flap of the cover – “It isn't normal to always be good”!
I couldn't resist a book whose opening words are – “One evening I heard a man who had served twenty years' imprisonment in a London office €¦”. It's entitled The Country' by Edward Thomas and I can't believe it won't appeal to a country man with two dogs.
A history of uniforms of the Scottish regiments and a copy of Tom Brown's Schooldays' made up my little haul.