Uncle! (enrobed in purple, as is only right...)

Every now and then over the last, um, forty-five years or so, I find myself saying "--Oh! You don't know the Uncle books...?"

And there naturally follows a long spiel about traditionally eccentric English vicars and books for children that started out as bedtime storytelling sessions, and wildly original British illustrators, and fantastical inventions like a fabulously wealthy elephant called Uncle who lives in a castle called Homeward and is utterly opposed* by the villains in Badfort across the way, and and and...

I do, I think, have all the books bar one, but they have been increasingly difficult to lay hands on in recent years. Finally, they've been reprinted in a single gorgeous omnibus volume, with all proper illustrations from Quentin Blake plus extra material if that matters to you. Thirty quid plus postage? It's a bargain, at least in the UK. Me, I am gazing enviously from these distant shores and wondering if thirty quid plus almost as much again in postage still counts as a bargain, when I may only be missing one out of six books anyway...


*(in many instances quite rightly, for Uncle is an appalling old Tory; one of the abiding pleasures of rereading these books in adulthood is feeling one's sympathies shift)