After Mentioning Martin Baker and his Fontana ‘foxtail’ series of Christie covers recently I found I had actually scanned a couple more and somehow missed adding them to the page. I also found one I hadn’t got so ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’ is now there. I’m grateful to David Morris from the ‘Collecting Christie’ website who also pointed out another boxed set I didn’t have. The slip case is the same for both but one measures 65mm wide and the other 80mm so they were not generic but made to fit the selection within. I have also been told that the cat on ‘Cat Among The Pigeons’ was Martin’s own cat called Fido.
After a visit to Attingham Park, well not the park as it was closed due to over 30 mature tress being down after a storm, we went round the house decorated for Christmas. This is always followed by an obligatory visit to the second hand bookshop and we were pleased to see this sign and the amount, some of which is due to the purchasing and donating of books by my wife and myself.
David Lodge (born 28/01/1935, London and died 01/01/2025, Birmingham) was an English novelist, literary critic, playwright, and editor known chiefly for his satiric novels about academic life, especially the Campus trilogy: Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988). Lodge was educated at University College, London (B.A., 1955; M.A., 1959), and at the University of Birmingham (Ph.D., 1967). His early novels, known mostly in England, included ‘The Picturegoers’ (1960), about a group of Roman Catholics living in London and ‘Ginger, You’re Barmy’ (1962), Lodge’s novelistic response to his army service in the mid-1950s were both published by PAN. The latter title was prominently displayed, cover out, on the shelf above my desk at work as my boss had very ginger hair. I think he was the only one who never twigged why it was there which sort of summed him up.