In Which I Realise I'm A Slight Hypocrite

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

It started so simply. There was a news report about the sales of the script of the new Harry Potter play by J K Rowling. I tweeted my incomprehension at how there can be sales of the play before it has actually been performed.

Some people agreed with me, others didn't. But then it all went a little wider. I tweeted that I didn't understand why people bought books containing scripts for plays in the first place for their own pleasure. Essentially what I was thinking was that reading a script makes you miss the nuances of the people involved. You don't get a sense of production,direction and of course acting through reading a play on it's own. However classic the text.

And again. the issue is those people who buy these scripts for their own pleasure, I mistakenly said that this never happens, which is of course wrong. Still the proportion of people who would buy a script when there is the option of a novel, or a biography must be extremely small.Harry Potter being of course an exception by being Harry Potter. As I see it the vast majority of people who buy scripts are either people in the theatre whether amateur or professional or students studying for exams for which they will hate the playwright for ever after should he/she fail.

The responses to that view were equally mixed and basically the matter rested by the good old throwback of agreeing to disagree. Each held to their own positions I of course having the correct one and those who disagreed with me being odd.

But later on that day (and you know what's coming next) I was looking at my bookshelves when suddenly it dawned on me.

I too had books containing scripts of plays

They are, Electra by Sophocles (which I've read and was bored by), a number by that well known Norwegian funny man Ibsen and one containing three plays by J B Priestley (which, if you read this blog regularly you might remember, was bought at a local village fete straight after I'd gone to the local tip so I was smelling of grass and wearing ripped jeans).

One of the "offending" books

The thing that links why I bought these books is that they of course all Penguin paperbacks. Either pre ISBN vintage or those with coloured spines both of which I collect. That is what attracted me to buying them. The power of collecting took over my natural antipathy,

Will I read those books I haven't yet read? Yes I will. Will I buy and read more of these books if they're vintage Penguins? Yes I will. Will I buy these type of books otherwise? Definitely not.

So that's what I am ladies and gentlemen a hypocrite. Albeit a slight one.

Until the next time.