Books by the yard for June 2014

I had to read The Great Gatsby in high school.  I know a lot of people did; for many it was the first "good book" they liked.  I loathed it.  I did not know I could hate a book so much (these were the days before the g*d-damned fish book).  That book, Gatsby I mean, was overloaded with very heavy imagery- those eyes for instance.  Anyway, one of the images that actually stuck with me was the idea that people purchased books by the yard, choosing volumes with quality spines to match their décor without any thought to the contents of the books themselves.  Which brings us to the June 2014 Facebook Quilt Block Swap Group swap block:  a books for the bookcase block.

I poked my head up & looked around other quilt block sites & there are indeed many different versions out there & they are all pretty good.  But none of them take advantage of one quality our group has that many others making these blocks do not: we can make the same exact same block using the exact same fabrics in the same order (for the first two sets anyhow).  Which means we can make these in bulk.

I will give the formula first & then specific measurements for ONE book; you will need five (5) different books, & maybe more but certainly not fewer:

You want to end up with a block that is, in total 8.5" unfinished/8" finished by the same (if it is a 1/4" to 1/2" longer that is OKay), using unequal parts book versus background fabric (did I mention the background fabric?  I think I might have forgotten.  It should be either white like bleached white muslin or a white on white design.  Please use nothing with anything but white, this way the blocks from different people can all line up on a single shelf). 


The background piece should be less than or equal to 1/2 of the finished block + 1/2" by the width of the number of books you hope to make; the book pieces should be greater than or equal to 1/2 of the finished block +1/2" by that same width.  For my first example, the back ground piece was 2.5" wide & the book fabric was 6.5" wide.  You might want to start with a piece that is larger than 8.5" total & cut it down when you square up the whole block (I know I wish I had).  The next book has slightly less book fabric, slightly more background.  I continued like this, staggering the heights so that every book was distinct from every other book. 

Cut the individual books anywhere between 1" unfinished/.5" finished to 3" unfinished/2.5" finished.  To the help the blocks go together smoothly, please be sure to use a book that is AT LEAST 2" at either end of your row of books.  Also, & this unusual, it is OKay f your shelf is slightly longer than 8.5" (but please not as much as 9"); this should help in piecing the rows together once blocks have been swapped. 

To make one blocks, you will need at least five (5) different books, but how many depends on wide your book strips are.  You should use the same background for all of the books in any given block; you do not need to use unique fabrics for each book in any given block, but please don't use the same book fabric in books that are next to each other.  It is perfectly fine if all five of your blocks are identical, it is even OKay if two sets of fie are identical but please do not use the same books in more than two sets of five.

Now for a word about the book fabric.  You can use any quilting cotton you like, anything at all (so long as it is 100% quilt cotton, muslin etc.; please no canvas, no denim, no voile, no interlock, etc.).  I used mostly single color, blender type fabrics with the occasional pattern; using many busy fabrics pressed against each other makes it hard to see the pattern of distinct books. 


I also went the extra step of making at least one of my books more detailed.  In one case -not pictured here- I added text to the spine (if you do this, please do NOT use the selvage; while selvage block can be wonderful a single bit of selvage in an otherwise selvage free quilt does not work-it shrinks at a different rate, has a different feel; it is more like home dec fabric than quilting fabric).  In the pictures you can see I also added a several strips of fabric along the top of one set of uncut books, effectively chain piecing a more detailed book binding.  You do not have to do any of this, but it adds a bit of extra oomph & maybe raises the challenge level if you are finding this otherwise very simple block.  You can also GOOGLE or BING or whatever book shelf or book case quilt blocks & you will find a number of variations, among them books that are stacked instead of in a row or books that lean....  These are all great but they are not what we are swapping.  if you decide to go whole hog & make an entire bookcase though, you could certainly make some of these different blocks for your own use. 

Books by the yard is the third Facebook Quilt Block Swap Group block of 2014.  Blocks are du in-house the last Saturday in June (June 28, 2014).  As always, we swap in sets of five, send five blocks & get five back or increments of five (You can include one or more 6th block if you choose).  If you choose to send more than two sets, please please please do not send two or more identical sets of blocks; be sure to use different book fabrics & different orders.  

Trying to turn a corner

I have had a shit-tastic couple weeks.  I euthanized my best-beloved horse last Thursday.  A few days before that & one day after, the neighbor's dog disappeared two of our barn cats (yes, I called animal control, I have an incident report, there will be a fine- it still sucks). 

But I had been looking forward to this past Saturday for a long long time.  It was my twice a year cleanse & renewal, my high holy day.  That's right, the Friends of the Library Book Sale.  We did all the traditional things, hunted for a parking space, bumped elbows with fellow junkies.  While we waited in line at the check-out, A predicted the event had another ten years tops (& yes, he has been saying this for more than ten years).  I ate too much lunch before the book sale & then on the way home we went for MOCHI.  It was a good day.

We also had a particularly good haul.  I know I say that every time, but seriously, this one was good.  First we had the basics that we will read, pass along to other people & may very well end up back in a future sale & that's just fine.  A found a textbook in physical science about color which delighted me (& at 5 bucks pushed me right up against my $15 limit for a grand total of $14.10).  He could not figure out what class it might have been for but who cares!  It has cool graphs about color!  I found A two copies of Susan Orlean's biography of Rin Tin Tin (we only bought one so the other might still be there).  The quilting books have been picked pretty clean the last few sales & this time the knitting books were also a bit lean.  One of my local librarians told me that those kind of books (746 et al) have been higher traffic of late, so less likely to be culled.  There were still a few.

I was looking at A Garden of Quilts by Mary Elizabeth Johnson & kind of on the fence (it's not the money, its the shelf space) until I flipped to the back & discovered these beauties.  It was destiny; we all went home together. 

My other happy meet-up was with an old copy of Maude Southwell Wahlman's Signs & Symbols:  African Images in African American Quilts.  Shocking that I did not already own my own copy.  Even lamer, it flops open automatically to....you guessed it:  Pecolia Warner's Bird Trap Quilt.  It's almost like someone checked this book out & gazed at that photos for, I am going to guess, hours & hours.  Oh well the library's loss is my gain.  & don't be too sad for them-they have at least one other copy of this book still on the shelf.  I know because I checked.

How I got Gwen Marston's Liberated Quiltmaking brand new & free to me

Have I ever told you about Paperback Swap?  I feel like I must have but maybe I didn't.  So here it is:  Paperback Swap is another one of those niche on-line .....communities seem unnecessarily broad.   It's a swap meet that specializes in books (yes, yes, it says paperback but really they will swap any book, paperback hardcover, audio, not e-books I don't think but when they figure out a way they probably will swap those, too).

It has a deliciously egalitarian quality: a book for a book.  Unless it is an audio book, then I think it might be two books for an audio book.  I don't know, I don't swap audio books.  The truth is I don't much swap any books, I just drain them from the system. 

Like all on-line communities (I'm sorry, I don't have a better word), there are users, abusers, good citizens & parasites.  Guess which one I am.  The system works when you add a book to your shelf, another swapper requests one of your books, you mail it to them (postage is on you, the sender) & once it arrives, a credit transfers from their account to yours.  You can use these credits to get books sent to you OR if you are my mom you can periodically refresh my account so I can get stuff without posting anything much. 

Now that I think of it, I owe mom A TON of postage reimbursement. 

In addition to the shelf of books you have to swap, you can also create shelf of books you want.  This means that when someone else adds the book to the system, you will get a notice (if you are number one on the list or if #1 declines & you are next & so forth).  You are limited in the number of books you can put on your wish list as there used to be a problem with people putting thousands of books effectively on hold & then declining them when they became available (to what end I am really not sure) leaving the good citizens who cruise old library sales holding tons of unswappable books.  As in most successful societies rules come into play when a few people make it hard on the majority...or whomever is doing the majority of the work.  Or sitting on the majority of money.  You know what, never mind about that.

I put Gwen Marston's Liberated Quiltmaking on my wish list more than a year ago.  It might have been more than four years ago, I don't keep track.  My local library district has one copy that I check out frequently & while I knew if I "lost" it I would only have to pay it's original cover cost less depreciation & not what it goes for on Amazon (just under $85 as of this typing) still it would be wrong to keep it.  Wrong.  I have to keep saying "it would be wrong". 

Library books that I cannot buy & no one else seems to check out are the very definition of temptation for me.  Lately Tintin in the Land of the Soviets has been burning a hole in my library card (those little pictures would make ideal redwork patterns & they are so...dated?odd?), especially since C****** told me they might be purging it even though it is checked out every couple months (guess how I know this), but I digress.

I started to list other books I have gotten through Paperback Swap that I never would have been able to put my hands on even with interlibrary loan, but then this post got way too long, so I will stop now.  Except to say that if you want me to e-mail you the Recommend a Friend link let me know.  You will start out with two extra credits & I will get one which I am happy to transfer to you.

& lastly:  M****** remember that stack of books you purged?  Well, somehow I ended up with a  Laurel Burch one which is odd because as you know I find the Laurel Burch figures creepy & not in a good way.  I am going to Paperback Swap it unless you would like it back, maybe to Paperback Swap it yourself (six people have it wish listed so it should go ASAP) or you would rather I gave it to the Friends of the Library which was our original conversation.  I think.  Oh & on another note, Paperback Swap is where I found that life on the Farming Today Yesterday's Way book B liked so much (would you believe Amazon is asking >$100 for an unused, brand new copy of that book? I swear some of those sellers are high).  Soooo, I will just give Laurel Burch back to you at bookclub next week, yes?

Today's word: Bildungsromans

I am not saying I never saw the word bildungsromans before.  I am sure I had.  I probably once had the definition right there at the tip of my brain.  But there I was in the library's digital catalog putting a book my mother had recommended (Tell the Wolves I'm Home) on hold.  As I was clicking through I travelled across the "Subject" section & there it was:  Teenage girls -- fiction, Loss (Psychology) --fiction, Friendship -- fiction, AIDS (Disease) -- fiction, Uncles -- fiction, Bildungsroman, Love stories.

First, let me say Spoiler Alert. Yep, I should have said it at the top, but I didn't.  & naturally, I clicked it.  Turns out there are >1k titles in our local library with that specific subject.  Even more interesting there is one (1) book with the additional subject of Bildungsromans American, one (1)  Bildungsromans -- Comic book etc, two (2) Bildungsromans -- England -- Yorkshire -- Drama, three (3) Bildungsromans -- Mississippi & a handful of other singles doubles & triples.  Oh & one (1) Bildungswesen. 

So the word itself: it means a coming of age story.  I wonder there were only just over one thousand as so many many many stories are, at some level, coming of age stories.  

Big doings week-end

There is A LOT going on in our little corner of earth over the next few days.  Let me start be describing the one thing we will not be doing & yet benefits us greatly.  Wait, let me back up.

How do you feel about football?  College football? Gator college football?  Well, we have a love hate relationship.  More like a like, don't really care relationship, but whatever.  The short version is when there is a home game we do everything we can to get the hell out of Dodge.  It is not just what the people attending the game do.  I don't mean drunk & disorderly, although that is a factor, I mean thing like the university reselling ALL THE PARKING SPACES to alumni & other fans, so if you have not done something about your car before the end of business Friday, you can count on getting towed & fined.  When you consider how much it costs to park near A's building (I will give you a hint: it is more than $500), you can see how it might get old.  Fast.  But added to that are all the people not attending the game, who just want to hang out & bask in the drunken halo outside of the stadium.  & that is before we get into any real rivalry games.

Well, this weekend is the most famous college football rivalry of all time:  The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.  & the good news is it is so damned big (& the rival is so damned close), they have all agreed to move it to Jacksonville & we get our town back.  Which means we will be able to move about freely & do everything else going on this week-end.

Today is the first day you can vote in the election here in Florida.  I am told that this is the second busiest day (the first being the actual 2nd Tuesday in November), but I probably won't get there until Monday myself.

Today is the first day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale.  We actually have a FOL booksale twice a year (we do love our library) but the October sale is usually the BIG one.  We will not be there this first day, but we do plan to go Sunday (the book sale runs Saturday to Wednesday).  We are arriving late because

Saturday is the only day of the Bat Festival at the Lubee Bat Conservancy.    We have never been, but I am determined to go this year. 

Yesterday I was on campus, for the first time in a long time I might add, & was talking with the most recent set of undergrads work-studying in the Herbarium when one of them bemoaned the "home game" being "so far away" & how he was just going to have to watch it on tv because without football there is "nothing to do in this town".

Banned books & living in the library

Starting today, a writer & editor (& fan of Kurt Vonnegut & free speech, I am guessing) will live in the Kurt Vonnegut Library in downtown Indianapolis.  His plan is to stay into October, through the end of  Banned Books Week. 

Well, good for him.  I am planning on reading a banned book; I have started the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor because I adored Witch's Sister & the sequels when I first read them  when I was maybe ?12?  I am guessing they have been banned somewhere as well (witchcraft!).

More interesting to me, though, is this business of living in the library.  I am interested because last month someone returned a dachshund to our local library.  The librarian does rescue cats, & feeds strays (& underfed "pets") & our best guess is someone knew she would find a good home for the little dog (& a good home has been found). 

Cats & the occasional dog are not the only ones who call our local library branch home.  According to the 2010 census, this particular town had a median income of $12,345 (to put this in perspective the 2010 threshold for poverty for a person under 65 was $11,344).  This town has no community center (although there is a Senior Center that does an excellent sideline with mentally disabled adults of any age).  There is not even an in-town high school; the kids that stay in school go to high school in the booming metropolis next door (population 3,630 per the same census). 

What is does have is a well funded library.  This is because the county has a well funded library & this branch is part of that system (not coincidentally, the school district is also county wide & one of the best in the country).  If the library seems like a waste of money in a town were people are barely scraping by, I promise it isn't.  This place is hopping pretty much any day you go in:  On school days, the tables get set up for all kinds of board games in prep. for the school bus unloading, the computers with internet access have long sign-up sheets & as it gets close to closing time, the kids line up to use a phone (in a just-scraping-by community, the kids don't all have cell phones, never mind smart phones).  Earlier in the day it's moms & grandmoms & great-grandmoms with toddlers having their own story hours on the carpet in the miniscule children's section.  On Sundays, after church, the Mennonite ladies stop in for their romance novels & the Mennonite men surf the web. 

For the start of this Banned Books Week there are big, big plans; here the first day of Banned Books Week is the Family Literacy Festival.  Because the first step in getting books off the burn pile & on to the shelves is teaching everyone to read.

Mystery, what?

I am a huge Huge HUGE fan of the Modern Scholar Lecture Series.  Our library gets them on the little digital playaways & I do not leave home without them, well not by plane anyhow.  Just last night I finished the most recent (to me):  Detective Fiction.  & I think it just might be my most favorite of all.

As for the playaways...  It is no secret to anyone who has spent anytime with me recently that I am not sleeping.  I think my sleep patterns were disrupted for much longer than I realized while Farley-boy was waking me to let him out.  I am one of those lucky people who can get out of bed, walk through a cold, cluttered house more or less without light, more or less without hurting myself, stand in a open door waiting for an old dog to finish his business, get back into bed & immediately sleep.  A once suggested this was sleepwalking, but I promise it isn't;  I AM awake.  If I have to, or if I am startled, I can be truly fully awake. Or I can just glide thru whatever routine I am in & then slide back into sleep.  While Farley-boy was still self-mobile, I might get up two or more times a night; it is hard for me to be sure really.  Now that there is no Farley-boy at all, I find myself reaching to the floor (he slept next to my side of the bed) & when I cannot find him I am am instantly, completely awake.  The other thing I catch myself doing is waking up to realize I am standing at the back door, resting my head against the glass waiting for....waiting for a dog who is never going to come back in again.  I mostly find myself this way on cold night, so I think I might do it most nights, but only wake up when it gets cold enough to rattle me.

This is where the playaways come in.  I keep one on the bedside table & I can "read" myself back to sleep without turning on the light & waking A, who really does need his sleep what with his having a day-job & all.

This is only the third or so bout of insomnia I have ever experienced.  Yes, of course I have not-so-easy to sleep times in my life, but whatever it is that causes them (deadline, bad clams, etc.) the whole thing ends just on the other side.  Only once have I asked for a scrip for sleeping pills & was given what I late learned was a dose that could be doubled with no ill effects; no matter it did what it was supposed to do.  I almost regret not refilling it, altho those pills would probably be dust by now if I had.  So playaways it is.

Major scores in 746

This weekend was the beginning of the Friends of the Library booksale here in our little county; I have said before it is the big social event of the season (two seasons actually as there is one in October & one in April, but October is the biggie).  This year we saw more people than I can list here, or that's all it would be.  One interesting twist, though, the first day of the sale over lapped with Pride Days here in town.  As a result there were slews of people sporting rainbows, of course; several same-sex couples hand-in-hand & I overheard more than one conversation between rainbow-wearer & FOL library volunteer clarifying "yes, we do this right about now every year" in both directions.  What I did not see was a single Dove World clan member.  No Islam is of the Devil t-shirts, no lighters or matches to be seen anywhere in the religious volumes section.  In fact, Dove-clan were deemed so unlikely to appear there were not even police posted around that area.  There were plenty of officers, mostly directing traffic around the hoards of pedestrians lugging crates of books from the sale across Main Street.  & they all looked happy to be there, actually.

A & I usually walk in together, look at each other & say "see ya".  Sooner or later we will trip over each other, sometimes more than once.  If he needs to find me I spend a lot of time in children's books & poetry.  He can be found in engineering, science or depending on the size of the crowd, taking breaks next to the big bay doors at the back where the temperature is likely to be several degrees cooler than the rest of the warehouse.

This year I made major inroads in 746.  In fact, I hardly left that part of the building at all & when I did, my bag was so heavy I had trouble lifting it.  I only made it from there to the lower 700s when A came looking for me (Okay that's a lie, I did a quick cruise through 821 & found what I think might be the very translation of Canterbury Tales that A***** has been so happy with & bought it for 75cents).

Most of my books came from 746 though.  There has been a knitting, quilting, etc renaissance in the past few years & in order to make way for the new stuff they have to clear out some of the old stuff.  That much of the old stuff on the way out deals with garment construction specifically bodes very well for those purchases.  I was sorry to see Judy Chicago on the weeded table but not sorry to bring her home.

It was a good day.

To kill a blood OR In cold mockingbird

I am one of those that reads To Kill a Mockingbird two or three times a decade.  There are legion of us.

This year is, of course, the 50th anniversary of its publication.  I say "of course" because I really truly do not know what you do with your time if you managed to miss this.  Either that or you live on an atoll (either virtually or actually) with no NPR & no public libraries, in which case I am very sorry for you.   Please accept my humblest apologies & consider getting out more.

Every Mockingbird landmark (anniversaries, movies based on the book, plays about the book, the decision by British librarians to list it as more vital reading than the Bible -go librarians!), someone always wanders back to Monroeville, Alabama to ask that slacker Harper Lee when she is going to get around to writing her second book.  There are only so many ways a southern woman can say "bite me" or "listen asshole, call me once your first book reaches half that acclaim & ask that question & then I will tell you to BITE ME"  so she more or less stopped talking about it in 1964.  Can you blame her, really?

I once heard Harper Lee described as a recluse & a modern Emily Dickinson & asked a friend of mine (who teaches Mockingbird year in, year out & still loves it) about that.  She said if Emily Dickinson managed to stay in college through that first semester, then went on to law school, lived & worked in NYC for a period, actively sought publication, I think you can see where this is going, only then could Harper Lee be said to be anything like Emily Dickinson.  I shared with her one of my favorite quotes (James Thurber, of course) in which Thurber compared himself to Salvador Dali.  He said his artwork had as much in common with Dali as on old ukulele in an attic has with a piano in a tree, & even then the piano would have to have breasts.  We laughed, we are pretentious literary types & that is the kind of thing we laugh at.

Back to the book:  ten or so years ago I thought I should maybe expand a bit & when I felt like reading Mockingbird (& sometimes I just DO) I should try try try to read something else first.  The natural choice was Truman Capote who, of course, appears in Mockingbird kinda-sorta (again, if you did not know this I am begging you please rethink your day, maybe even just run your errands in a different order).  It took a while but I finally worked my way to In Cold Blood.

I know there was recently a movie made about the writing of In Cold Blood (also called In Cold Blood, not to be confused with the 1967 movie called In Cold Blood based on the book In Cold Blood) which I did not see.  I planned to see it, at the theater even but a letter from the Shawn brothers in the New Yorker regarding the characterization of their father, who was Truman Capote's editor at the New Yorker made me decide to read the book first.  & I did.  & maybe you should, too.  Because Harper Lee went from writing To Kill a Mockingbird & expecting it to be quite small, to researching this book with her childhood friend & being quite overwhelmed by the impact of her not-so-small book.

In which an organization dedicated to the preservation of a childhood icon ponders prostitution

When we visited London in ought-five-or-six (I really do not quite remember) one thing I very much wanted to do & DID do was see the Pooh portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. Christopher Robin was also in the picture, but I do not care about him.

Not so very long before we went, some group in the UK (perhaps the very group...but I digress) had become quite testy with the New York Public Library because they (the library) had the actual original Winnie-the-Pooh in their collection & the complainants felt this artifact belonged on British soil, what with Pooh being a national treasure & all. In the version I heard, the library responded they would be happy to discuss it, just as soon as the British Museum returned the Elgin Marbles...& all those mummies...

I have decided to believe this story for two reasons. First, it sounds like something a New York librarian would say: snarky yet well informed, dare I say snarkily well informed? Also Pot-Kettle-Black is one of my favorite games.

Flash forward to last January when I read this & learned again that indeed nothing is sacred. The very organization charged with preserving the original Pooh concept, those same caretakers that licensed him to Disney & gave us those flat-colored amorphous things & the Tigger song which I agree is worth having & then turned around & re-sold us Classic Pooh, maybe even inspiring that whole Classic Coke debacle....

What I am trying to say is I learned that someone had been commissioned to write more Pooh. Imagine that Christopher Robin never grows up. He never really leaves the hundred acre wood. He never writes his memoir talking about how intellectually distant his father was, that his mother could give a chilblain a run for its money & that he is sick&tired of people asking him about the G*d D*mned Bear. We have to pretend we do not know he married his first cousin against his mother's wishes- not because she was his first cousin but because she did not care for the girl's father, her own brother. It is too much to ask.

This is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. You might not know it but recently the Peter Pan People aka The Great Ormond Street Hospital authorized a sequel to Peter & Wendy. I just do not know what to think. I do, however have the audio-version on hold at the library. Someone somewhere had the good sense to hire Tim Curry to read the thing & that I will not miss.

But back to Pooh. Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will be on shelves in a bookstore near you tomorrow & just in time for holiday sales. I am not sure I will be able to face it but face it we must.

//how do you play Pot-Kettle-Black you ask? Well it is very easy. Whenever you catch people biotching about someone else doing something that they themselves do, you get right in their face & scream "Pot Kettle Black!". It is most effective if you have something in your mouth that sprays while you do this. I try to keep twizzlers & beer in my purse for just such occasions. Tuna sandwiches work too. Originally this game was widely known (in my family anyhow) as Guess My Food, but I classed it up a bit.

Ban that bastard

I know you thought this would be about Michael Vick (ban him, too), but this is really about Banned Books Week

This year for Banned Books Week I have been reading The Canterbury Tales & Madame Bovary. Last year I was rereading Harry Potter et al & the His Dark Materials trilogy, so I guess you could say I am upgrading. For me, there is that banned books favorite I try to read every year (but turns out more like every other year): To Kill a Mockingbird.

So, run don't walk to your local library & make sure you request a banned book. Chances are pretty good, at least one of your favorites is being challenged as I type this. If you do not ask to keep them, they will not be there for the next person to discover.

How is a used book sale like the stock market?

Our local library has two book sales a year & they are impressive. The next one begins tomorrow & I would not miss it for the world. A will be out of town but I still plan to face the crowds (& there are crowds, believe me). Typically, we will drive downtown just before lunchtime; the real hardcore booklovers will have been waiting for the doors to open & will be trickling away by then. Sure, it will be blisteringly hot, but we will be able to find a parking spot.

We go to at least one sale a year & may go more than once in the course of the sale, each day getting progressively better bargains. I have never once been & not run into at least one person I knew would be there at some point (either because they said so or because it was so patently clear they must go at some point) & at least one person I was not expecting to see (not because I think these people are idiots, but because they just have not passed thru my brain in quite some time).

Last year we ran into several good friends including C***** who had brought J***** with her. He was going through old VHS tapes; she was looking for old 33rpm records to use in art projects. I also ran into M*** L** who talked at length about the GED program she volunteers with at the county jail; she was at the sale buying books to loan to the prisoners to meet their GED requirements. I learned that haiku is very big in the prison (or was last Fall) & a number of her books dealt with the history & architecture of that style of poetry. S** & R***** had traveled from their new home in North Carolina to volunteer at the sale because they miss it so much but did not happen to be there on the day we went. I wonder who I will see this year.

ANSWER: The initial sale (of book or stock) is the only time the originators (the author, the publisher, the principal of the company) really benefit financially. After that, the buying & selling of used books/stocks profits the seller. There are exceptions. My favorite is when a company goes public & the principal stays on as an 'adviser'. If the stock does well, the shareholders might vote him a big fat bonus.

If you are asking yourself why then does a company care so much what its stock is worth you are asking the wrong question; the company does not care (sort of), but the guy who is hired or fired on shareholder say-so cares very much.

//On re-reading this I realize I inadvertently implied I think people who do not support their local libraries &/or go to library book sales are idiots. Let me clarify: I think they are willful idiots which is so much worse than just plain old born stoopid. Glad to have the chance to clear that up.

My world IS flat

I do not remember when I started flattening things. But I do remember when I started doing things with the results. We were living in Joisey, more or less at the Route 46/I-75 junction. In this complete absence of anything not man-made I was fascinated by the variety of foliage in the drainage ditches. Within a couple months I would pullover & randomly press plants I found ANYWHERE. Lucky for me, A has absolutely no problem flying across lanes of traffic so I can hop out & get a snip of leaf or bloom or bark.

Earlier this year I made my return to the Herbarium on campus to begin the cross-reference of the Wood Collection. An herbarium for those who do not know is a library of plant specimens. It was here I learned there is a right way to press plants (& I was mostly doing it) & a wrong way to record information (& I was doing that, too).

I was fortunate to have access to the images I did when Kathy & I made this quilt "Floristic Inventory of Kanapaha Botanical Gardens" (originally exhibited at the Florida Museum of Natural History in 2006) & compulsive enough to record the information from the source labels on the back (with legend).

It has been a few years (wow! years) since I saw this quilt, it has been traveling off&on & I do not own it, so I do not see it between trips, either. As I look at these old pictures I wonder that A never once suggested that perhaps I needed a psych referral. Instead he listened patiently while I explained the intricacies of digitally recreating the shadows behind the native grape for reproduction on fabric. Lucky for him he can sleep with his eyes open.

Seriously, what was I thinking?

Alien abduction

One morning last week, the lead story on the the 'first name in news' or whatever they are calling themselves these days, was alien abduction. The gist, so far as I can tell, is that the stories must be real because they are so consistent. This also clarifies the existence of mermaids & the streets of London being paved with gold. Thank G*d those are true; I was worried.

I do not remember how old I was, "In Search of" was still in primetime if that helps, when one of my brothers turned to me & said "Isn't it amazing that all the advances we have made in 50 years (remember dear reader he said this before even cable television) & those silly aliens are still flying in that outdated saucer-spaceship using the same antiquated medical equipment" Indeed, that was amazing. It remains amazing.

I have about five minutes of TV-news watching ability. Then I just cannot take it anymore. The combination of tabloidism & cannot-get-off-my-shiney-hiney-&-get-a-real-story just wears me out. I have understood for a long time, my whole adult life even, that the point of TV-News is to sell us whatever is in the commercials; this is the same point of all TV programs. Accept it. Move on. I am even tired of the people who complain about product placement. Yes, that happens on news programs, too, look at the coffee mug logos, the golf-shirts, the suits, the jewelery. Grow up. Move on.

What I do marvel at is the level of boredom a person has to have to actually watch entire news programs. I do not mean to mock people who are interested in 'the news'. I am mocking the people who think this is where you get it. If decades of alien abduction stories have taught us anything it is that whatever comes to you in your own house under the auspices of for-your-own-good is bad Bad BAD.

"But where Oh Useless One will we get our information if not through the sacred box?"

How about this: wash yourself (this includes your clothing), open your door, walk out into the world. Look at the sky & behold WEATHER. So as not to become overwhelmed, you should probably turn around & go back to bed.

When you feel up to it, take a few steps (or drive a few miles) to your local public library. I know, I know books are scary but they have ushers, called librarians, that will take you safely through. While you are there you can fall into your old bad habits of watching & surfing but you will do this sitting near people you almost certainly do not know. & chances are pretty good at least one of these strangers will be convinced that something completely off-the-wall is absolute fact. Do not panic: my own library has several copies of alien warning type materials & yours will, too.

While you are there though, take a look at some other things. Maybe a newspaper from another country. Or maybe the local bulletin board. & maybe you will learn that while the global economy is not good, ballroom dance classes are very well attended (what is up with that, really?). Or you could take a break from cyber-stalking the Obama children & instead join a local harpist singing holiday songs (I am not making this up, if you are free 12/14 drop on by)

You know what, never mind. Instead, I have decided that we should all stay inside glued to a machine of some kind (I call shotgun on that most powerful of oracles: the coffee maker). I will soon begin marketing my own line of "I would rather be Useless" t-shirts. Places your orders NOW.

Saint Jerome

When I said that I rarely heard about the saints in real-life I forgot about Saint Jerome. He is the patron of libraries & librarians & today is his day. But more to the point, he comes up at the very beginning of the first Ghostbusters movie (which is how I heard of him in-real-life).

According to Saints Index, he is best remembered for his bad temper; I am sorry to disagree but he is best remembered as the delusion of Alice the Librarian's Uncle. Before that, he was the 'bald man' trigger in the movie Compromising Positions that solves the case. Two 1980s movies with people who either think they see or are Saint Jerome & since then nothing, so far as I have come across.

I probably should not be so delighted with myself for remembering Saint Jerome. Or rather, not-quite-contemporary references to Saint Jerome. But along with himself, libraries have been lost in the digital shuffle. Or have they?

Earlier this year, there was a vocal minority (I think it might just be one person) who was advocating the dissolution of the our local library on the basis that books are cheap & so is the internet, the money & volunteer hours would be better spent elsewhere. Sure it has won awards & is so well supported by community donations that there has been money to spare helping Katrina-victim libraries & other projects, but why not toss the whole thing & free up that valuable downtown real estate? If you want to ruffle feathers in a college town, suggest closing the public library.

This is not the first asinine library encounter I have had. Several years ago I was doing work for a large government institution in Ohio & my contact person there was a librarian. The title on his paperwork was something else, but his nature was librarical (that's right: librarical. It is like rabbinical only librarical), making him very well suited to his job.

He also volunteered at his local library & he told me the following story: a group of people who thought they had more public support than they actually did made a move to ban Harry Potter books from their library shelves. The first books had been ordered but had not yet arrived (did I mention this was a while ago). They lost, but enough influence was brought to bear that the order was canceled & the district did not feel they could purchase the books: funds were limited & would be better allocated to more widely circulated materials, blah ba blah bablah. They would however be happy to accept them as a gift.

Talk about a flood. Many members of the community decided to take this opportunity to stock the shelves with books that had been left off previous purchases without any discussion. I personally donated a copy of what I fondly call The Users Manual & I hope it is still there today.

Even further back, I was once sitting at a fund raising table for a library, in front of a grocery store when I got an earful on the topic "public libraries are communist institutions". That I gave as good as I got (our first library was founded by that well-documented capitalist Ben Franklin & so forth on the history of the American Public Library) remains a shining moment in my self-aggrandizing memory.

I have a bad librarian story, too: my high school librarian Sophie Brophy (not quite her real name) refiled all the Mark Twain books under Samuel Clemens because That was His real name. At least I think that is why.

She also used to sneak up on me when I was tutoring, jumping out from behind whatever she was hiding behind & scaring the crap out of me. In retrospect I realize she was trying to catch us making out (we were not, I would tell you if we were) but at the time I thought all the henna & home perms had rotted her brain.

Saint Jerome, as I believe I have already alluded, was bald. & I take it back about him not being remembered as difficult. Every librarian I ever encountered was difficult, just usually in a good way.