The Vintage Reader

Yesterday was a red-letter mail day. My Edward R. Hamilton package finally arrived, and now I have my long-awaited copy of Making Miniature Villages in Polymer Clay. I've never done anything with polymer clay, but this book is particularly inspiring because the houses are tiny and detailed and beautiful. I didn't realize when I bought it from Amazon Marketplace that the seller was Edward R. Hamilton, long-time purveyors of remaindered books (you might know them by their newspaper-like catalog). The author also sells signed copies, but I didn't know that until I had already ordered the book.

Also, I received my recent eBay wins, Faith Baldwin's Bride of Broadway and a lovely, pristine sewing book by McCall.

I've been after Bride of Broadway for a long time. It's the fifth entry in Dell's 10-cent series, which launched in 1951 and didn't sell very well; I suspect people had a problem paying even 10 cents for books that looked more like pamphlets. It's actually a bound short story with an awesome GGA cover by Wesley Snyder. The story first appeared in 1935 in Cosmopolitan, which at the time was a family magazine and bore little resemblance to its current incarnation.

One of the things I've always found interesting about authors like Faith Baldwin and Grace Livingston Hill is that their work is reprinted over and over for DECADES, and readers don't seem to care. I love Faith Baldwin, and I think most of her books are timeless; Grace Livingston Hill doesn't hold up as well, but many of her books are still charming (others have spots of maudlin weirdness, like at the end of Rainbow Cottage when Sheila and Angus are flying off straight from their wedding--which the brazen hussy Jacqueline has crashed, and gotten her comeuppance--and Sheila says something like "Oh Angus! Wouldn't it be wonderful if our Savior would take us up in his arms right now, so that we could begin our eternal life together?"). In the mid-80s, a Christian publisher picked up Grace Livingston Hill's books and published them with lovely old-fashioned covers. Even though I had been collecting her for a while even then, I could never resist those covers when I went to the office supply store (which in the area I lived in was also a Christian bookstore). As I recall, Wal-Mart carried some of the titles as well, although not all of them. A whole new generation of readers was introduced to Grace Livingston Hill.

I would love to see the same thing happen with Faith Baldwin: maybe a series of some of her best--my list would include White Collar Girl, The Incredible Year, District Nurse, and Blue Horizons--with retro cover art. Some of the Dell Mapback covers (Self-Made Woman or Skyscraper, for example) would be gorgeous as reproductions. Kind of like Hard Case Crime, but with romance.