Books and more books

World Book day is coming up - March 5th to be exact - but in this house it seemed like yesterday was actually the world of books day. I had a lot of trouble settling to work because it seemed that every time I sat down there was a ring at the doorbell to announce another postman/delivery man with yet another parcel of books.

That's what you get for living in a house of two writers - Crime and Passion as the Offspring labelled us. And yesterday there was a fair balance of both my books and the Babe Magnet's.

There was the upcoming Indian edition of Cordero's Forced Bride which is out in March, just as it is in the UK. Then the very handsome Afrikaans edition of The Sicilian's Red-Hot Revenge.

But for me the most exciting deliveries were two for the Babe Magnet. These are books I've been looking forward to seeing for a while so it was great to have them actually 'in the paper' so to speak.

Victoria's Spymasters (The History Press) is - well, just as it says - 'an insight into spying in the age of Victoria'. And in one of those peculiar coincidences that sometimes happens, as the Magnet was writing about one particular 'Spymaster' - Sir Mark Sykes last year, his remains (Mark Sykes' that is, not the BM's!) were exhumed in September 2008 in the hope that taking samples from them might lead to the hopes of a cure for the flu (Spanish Flu) that had killed him in 1919. This is the Magnet wearing his Historian hat - the one that he'll be wearing when he teaches the Writing The Past Course in Caerleon in July.

The other book is one that I personally love. Those students who were on his course in Fishguard last week and anyone who had attended Caerleon in the past know that as well as dealing in history and the Grim and Gruesome books, the Babe Magnet is a very fine poet. Much of his work has appeared in 'slim volumes' that don't really make many bookshop shelves so I was thrilled to get my hands on the Selected Poems and Monlogues that is now published by Emerald Publishing. I may be a total specialist but the Magnet is nothing if not versatile.

It seems a really good way to celebrate World Book Day with lots of different titles, reprints and new, arriving to fill up our shelves . . . now if I could just find a little more time to read . . .