This post is about finally finding a book from one’s youth forty years later – and after nearly thirty years of searching. It is also a tale a

“Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” – the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending

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2025-01-09 17:30:13

This post is about finally finding a book from one’s youth forty years later – and after nearly thirty years of searching.

It is also a tale about goblins and Christmas decorations; about the perils of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence; and about the real value of librarians, cataloguers, indexers, and archivists – what should be called the Noble Professions.

So if you are sitting comfortably, with a suitable seasonal drink, we will start with a bit of background and with a historical excursion.

And the story was in a book – a child’s anthology: the sort of book that one used to get in school bookshops and advertised in the special catalogues that were common in English schools (and elsewhere) in the 1970s and 1980s.

All the books I had at the time got lost – house moves and so on – and since the world wide web made searching for second-hand books easy I have replaced the books one-by-one.

When you re-read such books, sometimes what one thinks are one’s own original ideas and expressions stare back at you and you realise where you got them from.