Thursday, 15 March 2018

Visually Challenging


My daughter asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I’d already made my Father Christmas list, as usual. “Exploring Britain’s Lost Railways,” I replied. Written by Julian Holland and published by Collins, it gets around fifty former railway lines and tells us what’s going on there today in 300 pages, including lots of “then and now” photographs.

The book is OK, and although the formula gets a bit repetitive, that’s not my main problem with it. The print is tiny. My eyes are not brilliant and I have to wear glasses for reading and much else. This book just stuck the boot in. My bedside table lamp is not helping that much, so perhaps I’m in the market for something more specialist - but wait, actually, this book is the only one that I am struggling with, so maybe it’s the publication that’s got it wrong.

It is, after all, the sort of book that might appeal to people of a certain age in the first place [though not exclusively, admittedly] but why did they have to make it such an ordeal? I skim read the second half in protest. That’ll show them.

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