|
The Weekend
May 29, 2011
I hope all of you are having a good weekend. Since I am writing this on Friday afternoon, mine is only a couple of hours away from starting, and oh, how I looking forward to it. Thursday night I spent an hour shopping, then five non-stop hours preparing dishes for it. The books, as I noted last week, are ready to go—and now so am I. So I’ll see you next week.
ETA: It’s Sunday late morning, and I can report that all is going very well. The gazpacho is nearly gone, the crab cakes have been fantastic, the champagne fun, the eggs yummy, the turkey sandwiches wonderfully tart with my homemade cranberry sauce, the T-bone steak, well, to be barbecued tomorrow. And the reading! I finished Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France on Saturday evening with a final intake of breath at this powerhouse of a read. (More details next week.) It’s making it hard to get into my second book, All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West, as good a writer as she is because so much else seems trivial by comparison. But that’s reading. Good reading, if a book leaves an almost controlling impression. I hope yours—regardless of the book you are reading—is also good. It’s what we all deserve, isn’t it?
Upcoming Book Festivals:
There’s only one festival coming up but for the Midwest it’s the big one.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Festival: Printers Row Lit Fest
Date: June 4-5
It’s the twentieth year for this wonderful book festival, one of the nation's best. The festival’s hours are 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. With more than 200 exhibitors and 300 authors plus 125,000 attendees (making it the largest book festival in the Midwest), this festival has something for everyone. There will be readings and signings, panel discussion, performances, and special children’s activities. Everything is free but ticket reservations will be required for events held at the Washington Library Center and the University Center because of limited seating.
The Pub House:
Frederic C. Beil, Publisher is a small but active house founded in 1982 in Savannah, Georgia. It focuses on beautifully-produced books in the genres of history, biography, and fiction. Among their recently published books is Andrew Low and the Sign of the Buck: Trade, Triumph, Tragedy at the House of Low, a biography of intertwined families of the House of Low over two centuries in Scotland and Georgia. Nor the Battle to the Strong: A Novel of the American Revolution in the South is termed a “sweeping narrative” ofa crucial period in the Revolutionary War in which two characters, a Major General and acontinental infantryman provide contrasting perspectives on one of the bloodiest actions in that war. Soon to be released is Love and Ice: The Tragic Obsessions of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorer, a biography of the famed nineteenth-century explorer who sailed on two expeditiosn in search of Sir John Franklin and while doing so not only discovered the Humboldt Glacier but mapped Smith Sound, the route that Robert E. Peary would follow fifty years later.
Imaging Books & Reading:
Well, this book would almost certainly not be published today, though when it was originally issued in 1959 it was quite popular. Among its advice:
- The first principle of wife dressing is Complete Femininity—the selection of clothes as adornment, not as a mere covering . . . the wedding ring is only the beginning. When your husband’s eyes light up as he comes in at night, you’re in sad shape if it’s only because he smells dinner cooking.”
- A chronic blight on the American home scene is sleepwear in the kitchen! Negligees, bathrobes and terry towels do NOT belong with food, pots and pans. The kitchen is your natural setting as a woman and you should look beautiful, not bedraggled, in it.
The book was written by the thrice-divorced tastemaker and dressmaker Anne Fogarty who favored petticoats, fur handbags and tightly belted coveralls, and never had fewer than six sets of pajamas in her “active sleep wardrobe.” She took twenty pairs of shoes on a ten-day vacation, and even traveled to Europe with twenty-two petticoats where, at customs in Ireland, a suitcase holding eighteen of them exploded open. She also once woke her then-husband on a beach vacation by ironing petticoats on her side of the bed before breakfast.
Of Interest:
The Rare Books & Manuscripts section of the ALA (American Library Association) has a page that answers questions about “Your Old Books.” It’s a general FAQ’s page, but it’s a good foundation for understanding the difference between old and valuable. There are also links to sites on book collecting, evaluation and appraisal, and preservation.
Until next week, read well, read often and read on!
Lauren
|
