Penguin power

This sums up what my aim was today - read some and drink some tea!

Today I have been able to walk around the house without collapsing in pain for the first time since Xmas day - great improvement!

We are a household of books. We have a library full of books plus books in every other room of the house, probably numbering well over 7,000. They are novels, poetry, essays, plays, anthologies, dictionaries, guides, biographies. There are books on travel, art, photography, physics, mathematics, linguistics, cookery, engineering, broadcasting, aeronautics, nature, gardening, computing, politics and music...... there are many more, and of course a whole section of French literature and French language and teaching books.

Have I read them all - of course not! Plus I was not in the mood for anything too heavy, so chose The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler - Penguin edition. The story I know, but have never actually read it!

It also made me think of Teddy Young who designed the penguin logo back in the 1930s. The cover design is so simple but so classic, memorable and now evocative. There was a colour coding to begin with; the white stripe common to all, but orange was general fiction, green was crime, cerise was adventure, red for drama, purple for essays and blue for biographies.

Don't ask me why this, obviously, crime novel is in purple, as it sure ain't no essay:)