theoddsock.com

I’m currently trying to put together a nice banner for my Etsy shop and as far have been unsuccessful in tracking down some photos which I now suspect are not on the 1.3 TB under-the-stair storage array. However, I did come across two photos which are worth posting, one because it is a very cute one of Lucy and the other because it is just cool

Here is a photo of Lucy taken in November of 2006 - so she would have been just over a year old at that point. She’d made a little nest out of a fleecy blanket and it looks very cosy indeed.

The second photo is from also from that Novemeber when Jon and I trudged into London, we walked from King’s Cross to the Forbidden Planet near Neal Street, laden down with a pile of books.

The reason for this was that the books included out of print first editions of fantasy illustrations and one Goblins pop-up book, and we were going to a book signing by Brian Froud.

It was very cool to meet him - I was praticaly struck dumb, which is a bit silly but I’d grown up looking at his drawings in my mum’s illustration books and loved the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

I’d met Alan Lee about 18 months previously; Brian Froud and his family essentially seem to live at a cottage at the bottom of the Lee’s garden, like the fairies as my mother puts it. They seem to enjoy a good natured rivalry - one of the books I had brought was the original run of ‘Faeries’ which they had both worked on and I had already had signed by Alan Lee, Brian joked that Alan’s signature significantly reduced the value of the book

As with the books of Alan Lee’s that my mum had brought over from Ireland, some of the books I had brought which were from the late 70’s were so incredibly out of print and hard to get that the shop assistants were madly pouring over them.   In fact Alan Lee had said to my mother that even he didn’t have copies of one or two of them!