bedknobs and broomsticks book mary norton

Then, from pure mischievousness, I burst into the dining room shouting, “There’s an ectoplasm! I saw an ectoplasm!” The rest is a blur of fainting aunties and angry parents. I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded exciting and mysterious. I whispered it to myself, letting it roll off my tongue, imagining what it could be.

“I remember, I remember…” My mother rapidly steered the conversation elsewhere, but I was stuck on ectoplasm. “This storm puts me in mind of the last time I channeled an ectoplasm,” Auntie Dora intoned. After dinner, the adults tucked into the sherry and I snuck off to the parlor to sit in the dark and listen to their conversation. The lights kept flickering and the aunties lit candles. We arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm.

My mother mumbled something about “arsenic and old lace.” My father thought they once had husbands but wasn’t sure. Scan available on request.When I was maybe four years old, my family visited my father’s eccentric old aunties who lived in a fading Victorian near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.Īuntie Ivy road a Harley. Pierce's colour illustrations are charming, and the story is witty and observant, told in the amusing style that the author was to use to wonderful effect with the Borrowers. Copies of this somewhat fragile American edition usually turn up in a battered state, and copies in dustjacket are exceptionally uncommon.

In fact, Norton would go on to have a long career as a writer of children's books, notably the Borrowers series, also much filmed. This title, and a sequel, 'Bonfires and Broomsticks', in 1947, became the basis for popular Disney film in 1971, 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks'.

British author's first book, first published in the USA in 1943 and published in England two years later, in 1945, most likely due to war-time restrictions, with different illustrations by Joan Kiddell-Monroe. though scuffed a bit where a later price-sticker has been removed. The original $ price is intact on the jacket's flap. Pictorial papered boards and unlettered black spine, with bottom and top edges of the boards worn, but professionally and lightly repaired, some small repairs at the head and tail of the spine, nicely done, otherwise good in a good pictorial dustjacket with some professionally closed tears and a couple thumbnail-size restored chips (no repairs affecting either the lettering or the illustration).

Bedknobs and broomsticks book mary norton