advertising on Penguin Books

I'd never previously given much thought to the fact that a number of my parents' old Penguin books had advertisements on the back, but taking them off the shelves today, it struck me as ... anomalous.   This was, it turns out, very much a wartime thing, which, following a 50% rise in the cost of paper in 1937, pretty much allowed them to continue publishing throughout the war - and my parents must have been among the millions who were very grateful.  There's an informative brief piece about the economics of it here.  Turn the books over, and the pairing of ad with book is a little surreal.

Sorting the living room books today - deciding what to keep - has been hard, hard, hard.  Culling and dismantling the shelves has felt as though I'm tearing apart the backdrop of my whole life - I've known some of these books since I could first read, which - since that was before I was three - has been a long time.  I made some bad early mistakes, of course, disappointed that T. S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party wasn't about people playing badminton with a shuttlecock.  So many of the books downstairs have always been there - or so it seems.  The upstairs ones - thrillers, contemporary novels, Harry Potter, the evidence of my father's obsession with alternative endings to Dickens's unfinished Edwin Drood - have been going, bag by heavy bag, to Oxfam almost daily during my trips back.  But these ones all feel different: they seem part of my parents' autobiography; or they've been Christmas presents from me over the decades (unfinished Christmas presents, quite often - it's revealing where the bookmarks are stuck).  I'm finding it hard relinquishing my custodianship of this side of their lives: getting rid of my own books (in LA, in New Mexico) is much easier, since I know what I want to keep, what I'll never read again - and here, who knows which of them, or both, read Comparative Religion?  Of course, I'm taking a number with me (anyone got any recommendations for a bookshelf maker in Los Feliz or Eldorado?) - but only those with special significance, or that I want to read or have as a reference copy myself.  It's a wrenching parting.