Robert Louis Stevenson – a bit of a find

My daughter unearthed this in an Oxfam shop a few months ago and just got round to bringing it home. It has all the fascination of an old book, or in this case an old magazine with a hessian (?) cover and what I suppose is an old version of a ‘perfect’ binding, i.e. the pages that were once stuck together are now falling apart.

It’s a series of tributes to the writer and also has some wonderful plates – photographs of RLS and his family and also of paintings illustrating his works.

I’m embarrassed at how little I know about a writer who has been a household name for his adventure stories and the unforgettable Child’s Garden of Verses, not to mention those BBC Sunday serials of the sixties.   I can still see Alan Breck and David Balfour in black and white!

The other reason my daughter pounced on this is that one of the articles in the magazine was written by an ancestor of ours who knew Stevenson as a student in  Edinburgh. I think reading the rest of the book – and more of RLS himself – might be my first New Year’s resolution.

This plate carries the text from The Master of Ballantrae,
“The words and music seemed to pour out of his own heart and his own past and to be aimed directly at Mrs Henry.”
Could be a good place to start.