what about the plastic animals?

Zane Grey's House

By coincidence, as far as I could tell, the western writer Zane Grey lived in this house just upstream from the Delaware Aqueduct near where the Lackawaxen and Delaware meet.  It was in this house that Grey wrote his most well-known work Riders of the Purple Sage.  Today the house is home to the Zane Grey Museum which is administered by the National Park Service.  The museum was closed when I visited.  According to one of the park brochures I picked up, Grey enlarged this house twice in an attempt to get further away from his growing family while he was writing.

Smells Like...

One day over the summer I was enjoying a helping of takoyaki, Japanese octopus dumplings, in the little park by St. Mark's Church in the Bowery.  There were a couple of sidewalk booksellers along 2nd Avenue so I walked over to see what was available.  If you're not familiar with New York there are a lot of people that set up tables to sell books, new and used, around town.  I found this 1930s-era biography of John James Audubon that looked interesting.  Plus it had several color plates of Audubon's paintings. 

The bookseller examined the book and said it was a good read.  He started "I think this is..."

He halted.

He stuck his nose into the binding and inhaled deeply.

"Yes, this is from Ira Goldberg's estate in Bay Ridge."

I guess if you make your living buying used books in estates your nose becomes fine tuned to the aroma of used books. To me it had that standard slightly musty old book smell. 

The book is on my coffee table, patiently waiting for me to be in the mood to read it. 

Last week I managed to read How to Survive a Robot Uprising and Journey into Mohawk Country.  The latter is a graphic novel treatment of early Dutch settler Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert's journal as he traveled west from Fort Orange (present day Albany) to Oneida Lake in order to strengthen trading ties with the Mohawks.

van den Bogaert was 23 when he made that journey in 1634.  He would later be an active member of Nieuw Amsterdam.  Perhaps too active.  For a while he owned a share of a pirate ship which he joined on one of its plunderings of the Caribbean.  In 1647 van den Bogaert was caught in the act with a young slave boy.  In a Calvinist Dutch colony such actions were a capital offense.  van den Bogaert escaped northward into Mohawk country.  He was eventually caught, escaped again, and drowned in the icy waters of the Hudson.  The judge in his sodomy trial was going to be none other than Pieter Stuyvesant.   

To bring this little story full-circle, St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, where I ate my octopi and bought the Audubon biography is on the site of Stuyvesant's estate and is where old Pegleg Pete is buried.

Dawn Powell Lived Here (and here and here)

Mural in Shelby, Ohio (Dawn Powell on right, Charles Follis, left)

Orpha May Sherman Steinbrueck's house, Shelby, Ohio

9 E. 10th St. (1931-1942)

35 E 9th (1942-1958)

A favorite author of mine is Dawn Powell (1896-1965).  She wrote more than a dozen novels, some set in Ohio, others in New York.  Her books are mostly smart, observant satires that, unusually, treat the objects of satire with respect.  None of the novels sold well during her lifetime and her books were out of print until a revival of sorts took place in the 1990s.  Her cousing Jack Sherman, who was instrumental in her literary revival, died just this past spring.

Powell was born in Mt. Gilead, Ohio.  Her mother died when Dawn was a small child.  Her traveling salesman father remarried soon after to a woman who became the proverbial evil stepmother.  Powell ran away in her early teens to live with her aunt Orpha in Shelby.  She fictionalized much of her childhood in My Home is Far Away, which is about as unrelentlingly sad a novel as you'll ever want to read.  As long as I was in the neighborhood I stopped in Shelby to take a look. 

You would never know it by visiting today but Shelby was a growing industrial powerhouse a century ago.  In 1890 it was the birthplace of the seamless tube industry and the Shelby Bicycles (warning:  really horrible web page layout) made from those seamless tubes were quite popular.

Shelby was pretty quiet on a Saturday afternoon but Orpha's much modified house was still standing. The mural in which Powell is depicted also include Charles Follis.  Follis is recognized as the first African-American professional football player, getting paid to play for the Shelby Athletic Club in 1902.

When Powell first moved to New York she lived on the Upper West Side.  All those buildings are long gone.  Most of the her time, though, was spent amongst the mid-century bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village.  The building on East 10th Street has a plaque dedicated to her.  That building was designed by the firm of Renwick, Aspinwall, and Russell.  Renwich was James Renwick of Grace Church, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and Smithsonian fame.

Although those two New York buildings are nice places, Powell and her husband never had much money.  Their only child was severly autistic and needed lots of care.  Toward the end of their lives Powell and husband were nearly itinerant and dependent on the kindness of benefactors.  Powell died in 1965 and was buried in the pauper's cemetery on Hart Island.

Evidence

My favorite spot inside my favorite store in San Francisco.

Willa Cather's Homes

Willa Cather's childhood home, Red Cloud, Nebraska

Last surviving building in New York in which Willa Cather lived, 82 Washington Place.  John Phillips Sousa owned the building next door!

State Bank Building (1883) and Red Cloud Opera House (1885).  Nice, aren't they?

Willa Cather was born in Virginia but her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska when she was nine.   She went to school in Red Cloud, graduating in 1890.  While she was in high school she worked at the town pharmacy, getting paid in books, a magic lantern and rose wallpaper that is still hanging in her room in the house at top.  She also had a laboratory for dissecting cats and dogs in her father's real estate office.  Cather then studied at the University of Nebraska, where today you can enjoy the Willa Cather Native Weed Garden as you walk from Avery Hall to Love Library.

A fictionalized Red Cloud lives in Cather's prairie novels like O Pioneers, My Antonia, and Song of the Lark.  The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation is located in the beautifully restored Red Cloud Opera House.  The Foundation offers tours of Cather sites in town, hosts an annual Willa Cather Conference and sponsors cultural events in the Opera House. 

I toured the Opera House but declined on the town tour because it didn't start until 1:30, it was only noon, and I needed to be somewhere in Kansas by 3:30.  After the tour I bought a few postcards and a special souvenir for myself.  I also asked the two women at the foundation what place in town was good for lunch.  It was a bad sign when they both recommended the Subway (you can see the yellow awning in the bottom photo), because it was "better than other Subway's we've been to".  Throwing advice to the wind and refusing to eat at Subway left me with a choice between a cafe with windows or a bar without.  An hour-and-a-half later I finished the patty melt special and greasy fries at the cafe.  Just in time for the walking tour, but I was way behind schedule and had to get to  the strange and magical land known as Kansas.

In the Stacks

With an hour to kill before a doctor's appointment last Thursday I went to take out a book from the library.   The book was in the stacks when I checked the online catalog that morning.  It was nowhere to be found when I got there, but some of the old books were attractive.  I wonder how often Tommy Trot's Visit to Santa Claus gets checked out?

Half-price Harry

Who knew that street vendors took orders and had sales?

More Rats!

Did you ever have one of those days when everything turns out just right?  That's what happened to me last night.

As I mentioned yesterday, Robert Sullivan was giving a reading from his book, Rats, last night at McNally Robinson.   I would be able to make it to the reading on time only if I got a ride from work back into the city.  It was looking bleak all afternoon but I managed to find a ride a few minutes before 5 O'clock (thanks, Jon!).  That was lucky as the bus was stuck in traffic coming out of the city because of the retaining wall collapse on the Henry Hudson Parkway.  As we crossed the GWB we noticed no less than five news and traffic helicopters.

I got home in plenty of time to drop off my stuff, get a drink of iced tea and head downtown.  On the W train I noticed I was sitting beneath one of the MTA's anti-rat posters.  This one:   

Very appropriate, I thought.

The bookstore is just a couple of blocks from the subway stop.  There was only one other person in the section of the store where the reading was to take place.  A bookstore person brings out three bottles of wine.  I've never been to a reading where wine is served.  She offers us wine.  The other person declines.  I get a full glass (what you see missing from the bottle is what was poured for me).

After a bit of a delay to allow a few more people to show up (maybe ten total), Mr. Sullivan begins reading.  He's a bit quirky and apologizes for writing a book about rats and now reading a book about rats.  He learned today that the paperback version is on the Times best-seller list.

You might think he reads a bit, answers a few questions, signs a few books and then we go home.  Most of the time you'd be right, but not this night.

Conclusion after the jump...

Independent and Small Press Book Fair

I'm kind of slow in posting this but last weekend I went to the Independent and Small Press Book Fair at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesman Building in Midtown. The building is worth a trip in itself, but I was there to check out the books this trip. The fair had a mixed bag of offerings. There were self-published authors, publishers of hand-made books, publishers who only publish a narrow range of titles, as well as slightly larger publishers. While there I happened to see Nichelle.

I wound up buying a couple of embossed notecards. The Hollis Hills Mill Co. had a press at the fair and gave me a demo of how the embossing is done (moisten a sheet of paper then run it through the press over a piece of embroidered cloth). I lamely remarked "you literally have a small press here" and the women who gave me the demo thought that was very clever.

I also picked up a handful of bookmarks. I don't remember when I started collecting bookmarks, back in college for sure, but maybe even earlier than that. Almost all the bookmarks were free. Usually from libraries or publishers. If I'm on a trip and happen to pass by a library I've never been to before I'll often run in to see what bookmarks they have. I also check to see what weather/meteorology books they have on their shelves and whether or not they have any of Dawn Powell's novels, but those are stories for another day.

Twenty-five or more years of collecting means I have a lot of bookmarks. One time, probably when I was living in Saginaw as I was often bored when living in Saginaw, I counted at least 3000 of them. That's at least doubled by now. Too bad I didn't keep notes on when and where I found each. Some day I'll figure out what to do with them!

The Story of Margarine

Before we get to the main topic of today's post... Today is the last day of Columbia's fiscal year. I happen to have one vacation day left that I will lose if I don't lose. Instead of work I shall go office chair shopping, see if the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park has opened a day early, take a bike ride or otherwise enjoy the beautiful day, and finish up with Aimee Mann's concert this evening.

Now onto today's spread. Finding a book like this one, along with The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass, that I found lying on the sidewalk in the Village makes my day.

The Story of Margarine by S. F. Riepma, "one of the country's leading experts on margarine". Riepma was president of the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers (NAMM) from 1951 through at least 1970 when the book was published. Sadly, the NAMM website contains no mention of Riepma.

The book looks like a standard history of an industrial product. It sells for between $7.95 and $26.95 on bookfinder.com. I look forward to reading it!

The best part of the book so far, though, are the inscriptions. Inside the front cover it is written

April 30, 1985

Peter,

Congrats! What a full circle. This book helped me in '72.

Best,

Alan

I have been honored to have you work with me.

Flip to the inside the first page and you'll see:

April 30, 1986

Jack,

Passing down a tradition. The Best of Luck!

Alan

Too cold! Alan give Peter the book. Peter disses Alan, either by leaving it behind when he leaves or returning it to him. Alan, ticked at Peter, gives the same book to Jack exactly one year later with a terse, joyless inscription! Did Jack keep the book for the last eighteen years? Did he give it back to Alan?