Toe in the Water

Don't Miss These

Don’t Miss These

I may have mentioned before, if not here then somewhere in the hallowed halls of WdC, that much of my early reading was done in my mother’s collection of books. This was about as eclectic an assemblage as you could get in the late fifties and early sixties, ranging from Shakespeare to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but there were two little books that gave such delight that I still remember them fondly almost sixty years later.

One was Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitabel that I have written about elsewhere (http://www.madtv.me.uk/goneaway.aspx?BlogID=210), and the other was a gem written by a man named Giovanni Guareschi. The fact that I had retained the name of Don Marquis’ tour de force made it easy to research the work on the net. But, for a long time, I could not dredge Guareschi’s masterpiece from the fetid depths of my brain.

In the end, I came to it by a complex system of guiding Google by snippets of relevant information until it begrudgingly admitted it knew what I was talking about. The book that I remember so warmly was, and is, because it remains in print, The Little World of Don Camillo.

My research has revealed that the full series of Don Camillo books is available in a new edition from Amazon. The original illustrations may not be included in this edition since I can find no mention of them. In my memory, they were an important part of the book’s charm but, even without them, Guareschi’s tale and subsequent sequels are rewarding to anyone in search of wisdom and gentle humour.

Yes, this post may seem an obvious advertisement for a couple of books that have long been out of fashion. But, believe me, I am really doing you a favour. From now on, if you ever glimpse these names on some faded bookstore’s lists, you’ll be drawn by sheer curiosity to find out what I’m talking about. You won’t be sorry.

Here’s the link to the Don Camillo pages on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bookseries/B07G3G635J#

And the same for Archy and Mehitabel:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Archy+and+Mehitabel&i=digital-text&ref=nb_sb_noss_2...


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