The Bamboo Bookcase

So I've been sick with a virus almost the entire time we've been in Hillsville. I started a book blog to help entertain myself while I'm getting over this illness, based on the kind of books represented on this bookcase. (The bookcase is in my parents' house, and the picture in the center is my grandmother.) These are wonderful old books for girls, and they are now all in the public domain, which means that you can get them all as free ebooks. If you like book reviews, especially of girls' novels from the late 19th/early 20th century, you should check out the Bamboo Bookcase!

Scenes from the Week

This week, I watched some Lake Ella fish crows eating the cones from the top of a cypress tree and laughing. They have a distinctive mocking laugh that sounds a lot like this.

It rained almost every day, and this morning our shed was covered with a carpet of fallen crepe myrtle blossom.

I read some library books that were acquired back when FSU was still the Florida State College for Women.

And I drank a lot of blueberry smoothies.

Hitting the Books

This week David is immersed in research for an article he is writing, which is also going to be a job talk for an upcoming interview. It involves some giant books.

Bliss

The Birthday Outing

To celebrate my birthday this year, we went to my favorite bookstore, the Chamblin Bookmine in Jacksonville.

I sold two bags of books.

Then we entered the world of the Chamblin Bookmine, where the normal laws of the universe seem to stop working.

For one thing, it's bigger on the inside than the outside.

It's easy to get lost in the labyrinths of books.

But we found our way out, and we came home with two completely new bags of books. So it was a very successful birthday trip.

Monday Morning

While David was busy working this morning ...

... I headed down this green road to the Indian Mounds Archaeological Park.

I fended off mosquitoes to get pictures of the mushrooms.

And the ferns.

And the mosses.

Accidental Portrait of Our Future Apartment

I think Spanish artist Alicia Martin might be psychic.

Friday Morning

It was 102 degrees outside. A good time to duck into a nice cool bookstore.

The Chamblin Book Mine

This is the bookstore we went to on Saturday, as seen by an author I like. The bookshelves really do seem to go on forever, and you really do start losing your grasp on space and time. Come visit me and see it for yourselves.

Casa di Libri

So the book organization project is taking forever, but it's almost finished! All the books that we're keeping are now sorted by genre and on shelves in the rooms where they belong. It still feels a little like we're living in this house, though ...

It's a house made of books with furniture made of books, all carved by woodworking artist Livio DeMarchi.

I think this bed would be perfect for our apartment!

The Quest: Marathon!

This book stack is a tribute to my brother Will. Congratulations on finishing your first half marathon!

Elizabeth With Books

What happened to my hair?!

I got it cut and had red highlights put in it -- and actually, I like it. Also: look at all the nicely organized books behind me!

David With Books

Yesterday I met David in his office, and we went to a department lecture on Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica. Behind David are our Latin texts, which we're moving to his office as part of the book organization project.

Order and Chaos

So I'm organizing all the books in the household. Which means clearing off all the bookshelves. Which means that some things had to go into the walk-in closet in my study, even though it was so full I couldn't actually walk in it ... which means that I had to clean out the entire closet before I could finish the book project. How can the contents of one small closet expand to fill an entire room?

And then shrink to fit neatly back into the closet again?

I guess it's because now almost everything is in a box.

And now that I've cleared the study floor, I can use it as a book sorting space.

Piles of Books

For some reason the art of Nina Katchadourian is really speaking to me right now. She does this "Sorted Books" series of photographs, in which the titles of books form little stories or found poems. They are wonderful ...

... especially this one, "A Day at the Beach." Genius.

I started to see stories in the book piles that are currently surrounding me.

And I tried to make some of these book-pile stories myself. It's not as easy as Nina Katchadourian makes it look.

Moving In Again

When I move into a new apartment, I like to unpack, decorate, and set up the apartment, wait a year, and realize that I'm still not finished with any of it. Then it's like moving all over again! This has happened to me with each of the four apartments we've had over the past seven years. We moved to Tallahassee last July, and this week I decided to finish all of the household work that is still somehow unfinished. First on the list: organizing all of our books. We own a few books. And at the moment, they all look like the background of this video.

But I'm pretty sure that when I'm done with them, they will look like this.

Or this.

Or maybe this! This place can't hold too many more books than David's study, can it?

(Image sources: Strahovska Knihovna Praha; Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Lengua Madrid; Trinity College Library Dublin. From the book Libraries by Candida Hoefer, which I think I heard about from Emilie?)

Speaker of the Brokaw-McDougal House

My landlord Ev invited me to give a talk at the Kiwanis Club this afternoon. I think their speakers usually talk about the economy or medicine or subjects like that, but Ev said I could talk about anything. So I went with Greek mythology. This is the Brokaw-McDougall House, where the Kiwanis Club meets every week.

It's close to campus, but is surrounded by a beautiful garden with ancient trees.

This house was built in 1856, and it's no longer up to code. The city is going to allow the Kiwanis Club to meet there a few more times, and then they will have to move to the Golden Corral.

Which has a lot less historical interest. But several of the club members told me they were looking forward to the steaks.

"Because this is one of our last meetings in this historic house," Ev said to the club, "I thought we would have a historical theme for our speakers. So here is something a little offbeat: Elizabeth is going to tell us about the concept of a hero in ancient Greece."

I approached the podium and looked out at the crowd.

On my right there was a wall of bookshelves lined with lovely old books, and I could see that one of them was Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship. I took a deep breath and began to speak. "What is a hero? Well, to the ancient Greeks it meant something very different than what we mean today when we talk about heroes ..."

Messing About in Boats

"'Is it so nice as all that?' asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

'Nice? It's the only thing,' said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. 'Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -- absolute nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: 'messing -- about -- in -- boats; messing --- '"

-- from The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame

The Marvelous Bookstore

One of my favorite bookstores in the world is in downtown Hillsville.

It's Deez Beez Books in downtown Hillsville, and it's a treasure trove of used books.

They have such an amazing selection. Every time I go in, I want to buy everything in the store.

Instead, I only bought the books I absolutely needed for my upcoming trip to Alaska and the Yukon. (I'm not going to the Polar Sea, but this might be as close as I ever get.)

This is David's incredible find. It was next to some French books, and the title had almost been completely worn away, so he almost didn't pick it up. It turned out to be an out-of-print Greek text and commentary of Xenophon's Anabasis. For a classics professor who studies historiography, that's hitting the used book jackpot!

Blaine Dillon, who runs Deez Beez along with his wife Melissa, showed us his incredible find, an old letterprint press that runs by foot pedal. The tabletop models are in demand and expensive, Blaine told us, but you can find these floor models that people are giving away to anyone who can haul them. This one belonged to a man in Pennsylvania whose family had been in the printing trade for four generations. It works perfectly. It's hard to see in the dim lighting, but it's a beautiful piece of machinery with a spinning wooden wheel on the side. The person saying, "Whoa!" is Blaine's three-year-old son.

Blaine got everything that came with the printing press, including this stand with a stone slab for arranging type, made out of an old tombstone.

And drawers full of type from the 1800s. I can't wait to see the letterpress cards he's going to make -- maybe when we're back in Hillsville in August.