We’ve been taking advantage of the nicer weather and the early starts on a Sunday for flyaway start to the Formula One and MotoGP seasons to go and do some of the (relatively) local National Trust and English Heritage properties. And so of course I’ve been in the gift shops and looking at what books are on offer so that I could report back. And voila!
Lets start with English Heritage’s Kirby Hall. It’s a very small shop and this was about it – Kirby Hall is mostly in ruins and so it’s a spend a couple of hours here, doesn’t have a cafe sort of property. I don’t have a photo of the shelves on the left for some reason, but you can see the Collins guide to English Castles and there were a couple of DK kids books too along with puzzle books and the like for children. Kirby Hall was built in the Tudor period, so it’s no surprise that their main offer for adults is around the Tudors. And we’ve got a couple of overview books for the period as well as a Henry VIII biography from a respected historian and two of Alison Weir’s Tudor Novels (as opposed to her non-fiction works).
Next up we have National Trust and their selection at Baddesley Clinton. This is a much bigger property – the house has been there since the medieval period but was still lived in into the twentieth century (albeit with loads of changes over the years) and it’s got gardens, a lake and a stable and barn complex that’s been turned into a cafe, gift shop, plant shop and second hand book shop. It’s also not far from Birmingham and has a lot of visitors
Most of the shop is the usual mix of local food and drink gifts, outdoors-y things and National trust merch, but they’ve also got these two cases of books. And as you can see it’s a lot of cookbooks, puzzle books and gardening books with a few National Trust books that round up their properties on various fronts – I’ll admit I was tempted by National Trust on Screen which is a guide to their properties that have been most used in television and movies. But I had already bought three books, because the reason that there isn’t any fiction really here is….
The second-hand bookshop. This is just one bit of it – the crime section – and as you can maybe tell it’s in the old stables, with the horse stalls used to separate out the different types of books. This was a fairly ok split between non-fiction and fiction, and all of my purchases came in the crime section – mostly because I went through that bit first and they wanted cash, which I was running out of! It’s always interesting to see what crops up in these NT book shops – it can sometimes be brilliant, but you can also get the shops that have loads and loads of (probably) out of date non-fiction or very aged and worthy classics and almost antiquarian books which are not at all my thing. This one was somewhere in the middle – three books that I bought, but nothing that I could find in any of the series that I’m trying to pick up at the moment.
So there you are – a tale of two bookshops. I’ve got a list of places that I want to go to this year so hopefully I’ll be able to report back on some more as the summer arrives.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
I stopped at Baddesley Clinton once when I was on the way to Stratford, and they had a book sale on. I honestly didn’t know beforehand that it was on that day! It was one of the best book sales I’ve ever been to 🙂 .