Friday Reads: Flora Klickmann and her flower patch
I have a confession. Sometime I buy old books in op shops just because the books are pretty. I know. This is usually a really stupid habit, because our house is quite small, and I generally have to give the books back to op shops when I realise they are less fun to read than to look at. Sometimes though, my “Oooh…bookey pogey bait” habit pays off, because I end up buying books that I have never heard of which turn out to be fantastic. One of these fantastic and unexpected finds was two books by Flora Klickmann: The Flower-Patch Among the Hills and Between the Larch-woods and the Weir. I really almost didn’t buy the books. They were $5 each, and I’d never heard of Klickmann. And they weren’t actually that pretty. But I did, and they are fabulous. Klickmann was the editor of the Girls Own Paper in London, and the first book (The Flower-Patch) started out as articles for the magazine. This means that both books are more a series of anecdotes …