The Admirable Mrs King

摘要

Visiting Shandy Hall at Coxwold in North Yorkshire a few years ago I made a discovery. Not, however, one of the several obvious discoveries it is possible to make there, such as the beauty of the yellow-grey stone house and its three very different gardens, or its fame as the home of Laurence Sterne while he was writing the book which now gives the house its name. Instead, my discovery on that early summer day early in the new millennium was made in the Hall's second-hand bookshop - though bookshop is rather a grand word for what is no more than three or four smallish bookcases in a converted outbuilding. Even so, the sharp-eyed visitor can often find on these shelves unusual books at unusually cheap prices, many of them, unsurprisingly, about gardening.