The stars aligned for me this week. Not one, but two 1990s copies of Teach Yourself Swedish arrived in my postbox. Used, super cheap, but both so pristine you’d think they’d never been removed from their original bookshop shelves. Winning the eBay language learning lottery!

Why two copies of Teach Yourself Swedish, you ask? Isn’t that just being greedy?

Well first, is there really such a thing as greed when it comes to books? Our love knows no bounds. (Note: it probably is possible to have too many books, but I’m not there yet.)

Secondly, they’re actually different books.

A Long Time Ago in a Language Learning Galaxy Far Away…

You see, Teach Yourself has been going for donkey’s years, and by the 80s and 90s, the company had accrued a whole back catalogue of vintage language learning titles. As I’ve said many a time before, older language learning material shouldn’t be written off – it’s solid, albeit usually more grammar-based learning, and often very inexpensive.

But clearly, things needed a refresh. So Teach Yourself set about recommissioning a lot of those old tomes with completely updated replacements. It started in the late 80s, with updated French, German, Italian and Spanish titles. At first, these appeared in the 80s blue style covers.

But, come the 90s, Teach Yourself went arty in glorious technicolour. The book covers positively exploded in shapes and colours. Many are things of beauty (at least to my geeky eye), and it’s one of the reasons I love collecting them.

The Double Life of TY Books

However, those books had a double life during the transition. Older courses saw reissues, but with the bright, shiny covers. One last hoorah before they were retired.

But then, their successors (or usurpers?) came along, in their shiny, new covers – sometimes the same ones as the old course! Teach Yourself Gaelic, for example, recycles the same wrap even as it transitions from the old Roderick MacKinnon course to the updated Boyd Robertson edition. You can only tell the newer edition from a big yellow New! box in the corner. (No, that text was never going to age well.)

This clearly isn’t the case with Teach Yourself Swedish. Both the R.J.McClean and Vera Croghan books have their own wonderful designs. But for all intents and purposes, they were both still new language books in the 90s.

It’s just one has a much older soul. And I love it all the more for it.

The eBay Bookseller Lottery

With the wonderful quality of these two titles from that crossover period of the early 90s, I clearly lucked out on the eBay wheel of fortune. Items from the eBay book giants are generally in great condition; some just require a bit more TLC than this pair.

Of course, you can’t tell the condition of books from eBay supersellers until they arrive. That’s part of the fun, of course. But it does lead to the occasional sigh of deflation, as one described as very good lands on your doormat in a rather more dishevelled state. That doesn’t happen too often, thankfully.

And it a couple of quid a pop, it’s a fun gamble!