Passions: I'm addicted to buying childhood books and comics

Who says nostalgia isn’t what it used to be? Dive into a book from childhood

Smelled any good books lately? There really is nothing like the whiff of a decades-old book, the scent of the crisp, yellow paper…

… or maybe it’s book mites. I do hope not, else I’m regularly getting dozens of the things up my nose as I breathe in at the opening of the latest package from eBay or Amazon.

You see, I’ve become addicted to buying books I read as a kid – novels, non-fiction, comics, Christmas Annuals. It began harmlessly enough, with me wondering about a series of novels I read at junior school about an American family named The Tuckers. They did all sorts of thrilling things, like going away in a camper van or tending to a sick cat. I’d thought of them occasionally down the years but never seen so much as a single copy out in the wild. And then I looked at eBay, and there they were for just a few quid each. I bought one, read a few pages and was immediately transported back to a simpler time, when a pair of glasses was enough to earn a bashing from the school bully. Happy days.

Second childhood or a cheap and easy way to bring back some nice memories?

But what else might be there? Look, it’s Mary Plain, the adorable anthropomorphic bear who predated Paddington by 30 years. Bought it.

And hey, it’s Mr Galliano’s Circus, Enid Blyton’s tale in which Jimmy Brown joins the Big Top with his Mum and Dad and gets into all sorts of jolly japes. I now learn that there were two sequels… should I? (The only other Blyton blockbuster I read was The Three Golliwogs, but I’m not looking for that, got to keep the search history pure.)

The online auction site rabbit hole then took me to Bunty, which was a girls’ comic, so of course I’d never bought that. Nah, I read Auntie Bernie’s copies. Where boys’ comics were dull, soldierly affairs, Bunty had tormented orphans, lonely ghost girls, crippled ballerinas and, of course, The Four Marys who, I didn’t know at the time, were named after some Scottish historical biddies. I’ll have two annuals, ta.

And now barely a week goes by without me buying an old copy of Cor! comic, or a Commando book, or a Guinness Book of Records from the days when it wasn’t entirely stupid (“widest mouth – unstretched”?). So far as addictions go, it’s cheap and harmless. Well, if we ignore the book mites.