Back when I was a dewy eyed marketing assistant, the publisher I used to work for was moving offices. As you can imagine, the offices of publishing houses get fairly chock-a-bloc with books, and this was no different - wall-to-wall, in every nook, cranny and crevice: books.
As we were doing the almighty week-long clearout, I spied the edge of another book that had fallen down the back of a filing cabinet. It was a little dusty, but otherwise in good nick, with a note from an American agent to a long-gone MD. The book was Mrs. Ballard’s Parrots, surely one of the strangest, most idiosyncratic and yet honest books I have ever come across.
It has since become one of my prized possessions. Not only because of how delightfully odd it is (though I love giving it to people when they come over to watch their reactions to the ‘Sonny and Cher’ parrot vignettes) but because of how I got it. Never published in the UK, forgotten about in my old office down the back of a filing cabinet, found by chance by someone (I like to think) who appreciates surreal humour, especially earnest surreal humour, particularly earnest, surreal humour with Polaroids of parrots dressed up and placed in homemade miniature sceneries. It’s like the book was waiting for me, its perfect reader.
This book isn’t profound, doesn’t particularly inform me or reveal anything about myself (beyond the above mentioned taste for weirdness), yet because I found it the way I did it has become a favourite. Other books like this are ones I’ve bought after readings, especially if I hadn’t heard of the author before. There’s something about that sense of discovery that raises a book another notch, so if the book is particularly good, then it feels almost like it discovered me, a bolt from the blue.
Does anyone else have books like this? And does the way you find a book affect your opinion of it?
