Vintage Parade! (Picture Book Roundup #9)

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It’s been months since my last picture book roundup, and I miss doing it, even though it takes a bit longer to put one together. I love picture books and have a growing collection of them, because buying them doesn’t make me feel guilty about adding to my TBR (hehehe!)

So far I’ve done eight picture book roundups this year (here they are if you want to check them out:  one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and a special on The Three Little Pigs), and I’m aiming for at least ten for this year, so here’s another one.

Today’s roundup covers some vintage picture books I’ve acquired lately: An ABC of Children’s Names by Doris and Mary Ewen (facsimile of the Oxford edition); The Real Mother Goose (75th Anniversary Edition); Sam, Bangs, and Moonshine by Evaline Ness; Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag; and Curious George by H.A. Rey (books #145-149 for 2009).

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A Sad Goodbye

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Last week, I finally bid farewell to a bunch of books that were damaged in the flood, after my feeble attempts at resuscitation. One of my shelves got submerged in the knee-deep flood that entered our house, and most of the books that were on the lower layer got damaged. I am thanking my lucky stars that I never considered storing my Harry Potter collection downstairs.

Prior to this, while I was in Singapore, my mom had already thrown away a batch of paperbacks that were an indistinct  mess after the flood. When I got back, I still had a couple batches of soggy hardcovers drying out next to to the fridge (where it’s warm), weighing about thrice their original weight due to the water absorbed by the pages.

Last week, my cousin (who’s completing her internship at the Philippine General Hospital) warned me about the dangers of keeping active mold spores inside the house and I was getting paranoid, as my mom and sister  were both nursing a bad cold, so I decided to conquer the pile once and for all.

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Match Me if You Can

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I remember reading a couple of Susan Elizabeth Phillips romances back in high school (historical, I don’t remember which), but I’ve never read any of her contemporary novels. I’ve been reading positive reviews about them, though, so when I spotted a hardcover copy of Match Me If You Can (#144 for 2009!) at a roving book sale last year, I decided to get it so I could check it out.

My plans to read this book got derailed when one of my sisters (the one based in Singapore) found the book on my shelf while she was on vacation here and took it with her, so I didn’t see it for a year or so until I reclaimed it when I visited her there a few weeks ago.

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Those pesky price stickers

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Some people like to keep the price tags on their books to remind them of the book’s provenance. I’m  not one of them.

Aside from being  a compulsive plastic coverer (I can’t read a book that has not been covered in protective plastic), I’m a price sticker remover, and whenever I buy a new book my nails automatically itch to scrape off the price sticker. It just drives me crazy.

The problem is most price stickers are awfully sticky, and peeling them off takes forever, especially when the adhesive is so sticky that you can’t peel the sticker off as a whole (bookstores, please, do something about this!) and ten minutes later you’re left with a smudgy, sticky mess. It’s also annoying when the price sticker eats into the cover, leaving you with an ugly squarish patch (which is a regular occurence at my favorite bargain bookstore), or lifts some of the gloss from a brand new book.

Because I keep my nails short, they don’t offer much leverage when picking at price stickers, especially the really stubborn ones that refused to budge. So eventually I had to resort to other removal procedures.

Here are are two methods I use to remove price stickers.

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid

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I’ve been hearing so much about this book in the last year, and for some reason I forgot that my cousin Dianne gave me a copy of this book last Christmas, as it got buried in the TBR pile. Thankfully I managed to dig it out sometime before the flood so it didn’t get wet or join the rubble of books that were brought upstairs for safety against the flood which I am still in the process of reshelving.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (#143 for 2009) caught my eye when I first saw it on the bookstore shelf; the words “a novel in cartoons” jumped out at me and I just knew I had to read the book.

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