By the second day, I had already made the rounds of all the town bookstores. I walked into a used bookstore auspiciously named Cambrensia Books. I asked the sales clerk if she had any books on or in Middle Welsh. An elderly woman sitting on a stool beside the clerk quashed whatever the clerk's reply might have been and asked me where I was from, if I was interested in Welsh history, if I spoke the language, all in one breath. Nora Chadwick's The Celts is still the best basic book on the Celts out there.
Fairy tales are ideal for collecting.
They all resemble each other in some way, but they're different, and they lend themselves to opulent illustration. I developed an interest in fairy tales because of the collections edited by Andrew Lang, a 19th-century Scottish ethnologist and folklorist whose work was reprinted by Dover Books. They have wonderful Art Nouveau illustrations and a fascinating range of stories from different cultures-probably somewhat bowdlerized but never dull. I was given The Violet, Olive, and Brown Fairy Books as a child and read them dozens of times. Here in Germany fairy tales and folklore are taken very seriously.