It’s Friday!! Yay! The end of the week is just so wonderful, isn’t it? It also means it’s time for another Exploring My Bookshelves, co-hosted by Shannon @ For the Love of Words and Victoria @ Addlepates and Book Nerds. The aim of this meme to explore other people’s bookshelves and see all the beautiful books that they’re hoarding. Each week they give us a new theme to feature one book on our bookshelves with and this week’s theme is:

A Book You Don’t Want to Read for Risk of Damaging It

I actually found this a little tricky to think of a book for this because I don’t own many ‘precious’ books that I’m terrified to touch. Almost every book I read I’m careful not to damage – and when I spill something on a book or break its spine I have nightmares for days. But for the most part I’m pretty careful with my books. HOWEVER. I do have one book that is probably the most beautiful thing you’re going to see this week that I NEVER it read outside of the house – in fact I’d quite like to invest in one of those little metal sticks to turn the page with for it.

But before we get to that – the shelfie!

This is part of my family bookshelves, as technically speaking, my Dad owns all the A Song of Ice and Fire series. They look so pretty on the shelf with all their colours and sameness – eep! I love to just stare at them . . .

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The book I daren’t touch:

The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery
Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Illustrator: Ian Beck
Published: 1981
Publisher: Octopus Books Limited
Pages: 800

This is one of my favourite editions of a book on my shelf. My Dad also technically owns this one (but I stole it and put it on my shelf – bit of a theme here . . . ). He bought this in Europe (where he lived before we moved to Australia) and I believe he picked it up somewhere in England. But it could be Ireland. In any case, it’s from a cold country on the other side of the world and it’s LEATHER-BOUND. I have a huge thing for books that are leather bound and because this is a lot older than my Barnes & Noble collection of the classics this one looks so much cooler.

I don’t take this outside the house primarily because it’s far too big to fit in a handbag, but also because this is a special book and I’m 100% sure I could not replace it easily. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t read from it. This contains every single one of the Sherlock stories, and I’ve read The Hound of the Baskervilles which is, coincidentally, the very last book in this bind up. The green colour of the book makes it look über sophisticated and I would be utterly heart-broken if I were to damage this in any way. Disappointingly, this doesn’t have it’s own little ribbon bookmark built-in – they always make books 13% cooler. Ah well.

Fun story for you: last year when I was in Ireland a family friend took me through Dublin and pointed out a building that used to be owned (or something) by Doyle’s family but has since been renamed. Ah, Dublin – so much history in that city!

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 Do you have a book like this? A family heirloom or something very special?

I’d love to know!

If you are desperate to get your hands on a copy of this book I’m afraid I don’t know where exactly you can do this. Although, I believe Amazon is your best bet. I’m fairly certain that Octopus has brought out a handful of other classics in this beautiful edition too.

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~~ Kirstie ~~

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