Thank you, Doris Lessing

I came across some pictures from the writer's Doris Lessing home in West Hamspted. Many showed the remarkable woman with her many books in the background.

You know what? I'm going to stop beating myself up about the number of books I possess.

However, I must admit, that it is the Internet that has just provided me with this indispensable piece of information:

In 1665 Samuel Pepys visited Sir Robert Viner at Swakeleys, afterwards recording in his diary that Sir Robert “showed me a black boy that he had, that died of a consumption, and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box.”