Well, this seemed interesting at the time...

A couple of weeks ago, I found a 1982 version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (illustrated by Quentin Blake, as you see above) at younger daughter's school library. I dusted off a tape I'd made of the late nineties television version with Donny Osmond, Richard Attenborough, and Joan Collins (in a stunningly risqué outfit as Potiphar's wife) and showed it to younger daughter. Despite the terrible quality of the tape (made by our first VCR in its final stages of 15 or so years of steady service), younger daughter enjoyed following along with the book, so I immediately ordered a DVD and the book through Amazon.ca. The book that arrived had a Quentin Blake illustration on the front, but was filled with musical scores, and I noticed that younger daughter reached for the now-overdue library book when I played the DVD. So I checked my favourite rare book websites: AbeBooks and Alibris which are two sites I have come to know and love doing genealogy research (mostly for out-of-print books written by distant relatives). I noticed one of the booksellers offering Quentin Blake's Joseph was an Ottawa-based company named Granny Goose, so I emailed and asked if they actually had a shop where I could come and avoid the shipping charge.

To make a tedious story short, that's what I was doing hanging out on a bench outside a deli in a so-called esplanade (just a mini-mall, really) this morning, with $17.50 in my pocket, feeling slightly sinister. Of course, a perfectly nice lady showed up with my book and we had a delightful chat about the state of children's literature, the obligatory sex scene that each adult novel seems to have (whether relevant to the plot or not), and anachronisms in films and books. She's a big fan of Rosemary Sutcliff, of whom I'd never heard (especially since I spent five minutes googling "Veronica Hitchcock" which was all I could remember by the afternoon), and will have to look her up. She told me that it was a comfort to leave a book "in the right hands", and departed remarking that I'd be well-suited to her book club.

Funny, the closest I've ever been to being invited to join a book club (and you do seem to need an invitation, don't you?) is one in Victoria which had evolved beyond the books. They'd decided to proceed directly to eating and talking. It was great, a lot less like homework...