I have an unfortunate habit of jollying myself up by buying books. I suspect I’m not alone in this. And while some of my purchases can be justified – I’m a writer, I need these books for research – others are just because I want to read them… And then they sit on my bookshelves for a decade before I finally get around to reading them. It may be even longer for some…

Three for SF Mistressworks. I forget where I stumbled across mention of Brenda Pearce – perhaps someone mentioned her on Twitter? Anyway, she appears to be well and truly forgotten, so I immediately tracked down Worlds for the Grabbing, the second of her two novels. I thought Memories and Visions was a critical work when I ordered it, but it proved to be a women-only anthology, containing a number of well-known names, such as Laurell K Hamilton (her second short story sale, it’s not even in isfdb.org), L Timmel Duchamp (her first fiction sale), RM Meluch and even Lorraine Schein (who will appear in my mini-anthology, Aphrodite Terra). In the Chinks of the World Machine is an important critical work on feminist sf, published by The Women’s Press in 1988.

Some books for the watery research shelf. The Deepest Days was a lucky find – it’s about Edwin Link’s Man in Sea project by the diver, Robert Sténuit, who spent 24 hours on the floor of the Mediterranean and so became the world’s first “aquanaut”. Exploring the Deep Frontier is a ginormous coffee-table book by National Geographic, which I think was published to accompany a television series. And Stalin’s Gold is about the salvage operation in 1981 to recover 4.5 tonnes of gold from HMS Edinburgh, which sank in 1942 carrying part-payment from the USSR to the allies for supplies. The ship lay in 245 m (800 ft) of water, just north of Kola Bay.

I’ve been picking up issues of Wings of Fame on eBay when I see new copies going for a decent price. Only twenty issues were published, and I now have twelve of them. Our Space Age Jets I found on eBay and I just couldn’t resist the title.

I was in a charity shop, and I found three DH Lawrence paperbacks, all in the same design: white, with Lawrence’s name in orange, and a photograph square in the middle of the front cover. I already had three the same back home, so I thought, these will make a nice set. A bit of research and I discovered that Penguin had published twenty such paperbacks between 1970 and 1977, not just the novels but also short story collections and non-fiction. So I’m going to collect them. John Thomas and Lady Jane, The First Lady Chatterley and The Mortal Coil and Other Stories were from the charity shop; Three Novellas: The Ladybird / The Fox / The Captain’s Doll and The Woman Who Rode Away I found on eBay.