Agatha Christie, and more Agatha Christie

 I seem to be going through a bit of an Agatha Christie period of my life.

Not only have I read two or three of her mystery novels as my bedtime reading - and I certainly did not expect the ending in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd, today I catalogued the Christie novels in the Athenaeum's historic book collection.

Apart from an early edition of the Seven Dials Mystery, most of them were post world war two crime club editions, and not particularly remarkable.

As I've written elsewhere, I'm fascinated by the fact that she simply took the train to Iraq in the nineteen thirties when when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, on his archaeological excavations in north eastern Syria, and in Come, tell me how you live she describes catching the Taurus Express - the Orient Express's eastern cousin at a remote railway station just across the border in Turkey, and how this train of blue Compagnie des Wagon Lits carriages appeared out of the desert, and train conductors wearing smart uniforms loaded her luggage and helped her onto the train before continuing its journey across the wilds of eastern Turkey.

But that wasn't the most adventurous journey. 

The bus from Damascus to Iraq in the 1930's must have been quite something - no roads, just a hard packed desert track across the emptiness.

I havn't been able to find an image of the track from the 1930's, but I did find one dating from 1970, when it was still a wild unpredictable track across the desert...

However, it wasn't all Agatha Christie today, a couple of golden age crime novels, 

including a copy of John Dickson Carr's Death watch, evidently just about read to death, given how scuffed the cover is, a few romances and an 1874 edition of Wiiliam Carleton's The Black Baronet