Virago

On recent visits to Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny I could not help but notice their plentiful stock of used Virago “Modern Classics” paperbacks all arranged together in their distinctive dark green livery. Last time I was there I decided to buy some of them, picking out a couple of the slenderer volumes: The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman and Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man. They have joined eight other books already on my shelves bearing the Virago/VMC imprint.

There have been others that have come and gone in the past. The first one I bought, ca. 1990, was Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies. I was curious to try it having been much impressed by Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky. It may have been quite a while before my second Virago, as, for too many years, male authors heavily outnumbered female ones in the fiction section of my library. This was oddly specific sexism on my part as there was always a more equal gender balance in the non-fiction and poetry I read. More recently I had copies of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show and The Corner that Held Them. And, in addition to the four books of hers shown above, I owned Barbara Comyns' novels Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead and The Skin Chairs. If shelf-space weren’t at such a premium, I would have held on to them all.

The copy of Comyns' debut novel Sisters by a River in the picture has ‘Virago Modern Classics’ on the cover but a Penguin logo on its spine. The same author’s Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Vet’s Daughter are both from printings post-dating the dark-green colour-scheme. At the bottom of the stack is an ’80s VMC hardback original in the shape of Jennifer Dawson’s The Upstairs People, which I sought out after her first book The Ha-Ha had hit the spot for me. The other two hardbacks are both short-story collections by Daphne du Maurier (The Birds and Don’t Look Now) and are from the decorative VMC ‘Designer Collection’ launched in 2008.