may day timeslip

Its cold and overcast this May Day on Moonbase.

I'm slurping cwoffee and idly googling.

All my old paperbacks are checked on Amazon but as expected most being ready for the charity bag. I've kept two to read, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe and The Bicentennial Man by Asimov, which I'm sure I read on a beach holiday. I'll re-Asimov this summer again.

I do love checking books on Amazon. Its so relaxing and so easy with the ISBN numbers. Its harder when there isn't one on a book - from the Fifties and early Sixties say or other countries, but sometimes there might be one from the same year with an ISBN number! Go figure!

Two paperbacks I have next to me without ISBN numbers are Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, an American novel from 1974 and Woman of Straw, a British book first published in 1957.

I assume location and age respectively are the key factors here determining the lack of numbering.

Presumably like any large global system ISBN numbering was intermittent to start with and then picked up coverage as it bedded in. 

Its an amazing thought that every book more or less is uniquely numbered. Not many household objects are numbered like this. Certainly not VHS or records, my other great passions. OK, there are some numbers on these but its not an all-encompassing system like ISBN.

Anyways, many titles are heading back to the thrift store from whence they came: Red Heat, Black Hole, Street Hawk, Catweazle, Quantum Leap, The Sweeney and so on.

One novel teetering on the brink though is Timeslip. I seem to recall the ATV TV series about two kids slipping through time. The lad wore glasses like me and looked quite geeky.

The back cover blurb reads as follows:

"St. Oswald, Rutland 1970 - and a quiet stroll to a deserted naval station proves the beginning of a terrifying adventure."

Published by Pan in 1970 Timeslip cost just 4 shillings or as shown in brackets on the book, 20p, as the UK was slipping into decimalisation at the time.

Interestingly the blurbs for more Pans at the back include UFO by Robert Miall, presumably the first TV tie-in to the Gerry Anderson series.

Should Timeslip stay on Moonbase readers? Any good?