I love repurposed living spaces, such as this barn turned reading room and guest cottage. I think it shows great design sensibilities and is a supremely livable space. I want to see what is behind that door – and to curl up in the poofy chair.
From Bookshelf roundup
full story at house and garden
photos by Paul Massey
A 19th century structure removed from context and re-imagined. A spiraling staircase – a fragment of a coil – standing in half shadow. It’s no longer a means to go somewhere, it has become the somewhere. Once held up by four walls, it is now re-mastered and self-supporting. Leavened by gravity and steel, heavy as the shadows. The oak and pine is pitted with a century and a half of daily rituals. It was discovered as a crumbling splinter of its former self. Careful, painstaking repairs have paved the way for its new function. A discrete yet bold intervention – a seat in place of steps, where dark cushions encourage you to pause. An old thoroughfare is now a place to stop, and read. In solitary contemplation, or intimate recital. The Reading Steps disorder the previous function, and create a new calm certainty. It’s about the beauty of a quiet disruption.
Known as “job stoppers,” knuckle tattoos make a bold statement because our hands are such public parts of our bodies. Photographer Edward Bishop has collected photographs of over 500 knuckle tattoos. He has been interviewed about the project here and he has a website about the project that includes information about his book and a knuckle tattoo generator so that you can create something that is unique to your style.
Here are some of the tattoos he has collected. All photographs are by Edward Bishop.
This would be mine if I had a tattoo, which I don’t, but if I did . . .
May 23 is the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, who wrote the iconic children’s book, Goodnight Moon, and a hundred other titles.
Her professional career was influenced by her work at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City. This was a time of intense interest in the intellectual development of children. It was there that she began writing children’s books.
Brown was born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York. As she matured, she developed a wonderfully independent lifestyle. She maintained a house in Maine where she would leave champagne bottles on the paths around her house and would skinny dip off her dock to the delight of the local fisherman. (I cannot imaging skinny dipping in any water I have experienced in Maine.)
Although Brown had no children of her own, I think it was her open-eyed and child-like enthusiasm for life that led to her success in writing for children. She died too young, from an embolism after an appendicitis – on the eve of her engagement.
This story is a reprint of an article by Paul Kerley in the BBC News Magazine
And here is a related article from NPR
When Sir Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctica on his ship Endurance, he made sure he had plenty of reading material. But details of precisely what books he took have remained hidden in this photograph – until now.
The image from the ill-fated South Pole expedition – taken in early March 1915 by Australian photographer Frank Hurley – has been digitised by the Royal Geographical Society in London.
It is now known that the explorer carried with him dictionaries, encyclopedias and books chronicling other dangerous polar expeditions.
He took established works by Dostoyevsky and Shelley – but also, explains Alasdair MacLeod from the RGS, “newly published fiction by popular authors of the time”.
“The cabin wall on the left also shows a framed print of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’, which Shackleton carried with him on to the ice floe when the ship sank.”
In January 1915, Endurance and her 28-man crew became trapped in ice in the Weddell Sea. Shackleton and his men would remain there for 10 months – until the ship sank and they moved on to the ice. In April 1916, in three small boats taken off Endurance, the crew left the ice and began an arduous voyage to uninhabited Elephant Island. From there, Shackleton took a small group with him to South Georgia – 750 miles away – where they finally got help.
All members of Endurance’s crew survived.
Scroll down to see the full list of books identified by experts at the RGS – and see more stark images of Shackleton’s struggle for survival.
Books on Shackleton’s bookshelf:
The Newbery, the Caldecott, the King awards have all been announced for this year, but what about the Bulwer-Lytton Award? This award, created in 1982 by San Jose University, recognizes the world’s worst sentence. This award was inspired by Victorian author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who penned the infamous, “it was a dark and stormy night.” In full:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
More information including writing contest rules, winners, more wretched writing, and a quiz I particularly liked where you have to determine if a passage was written by Dickens or Bulwer-Lytton, can be found at Bulwer-Lytton website.
“Books breathe as trees breathe. When all the books have gone our mental climate will have changed. It’s a question whether we’ll survive. Technology cannot replace a book. No matter that I can quickly find a digital version of a novel I’m looking for, I still fly into a rage when I discover I no longer have it, and remember who borrowed and didn’t return it, five, 10, 20 years ago. For it is irreplaceable. It has my scribblings in it. The marginal expletives. The turned-down pages. The bus ticket or taxi receipt or even billet doux employed as a bookmark – not just the marginalia of an intellectual life but the detritus of the heart. And that you don’t get on a Kindle, or a free e-book courtesy of Project Gutenberg. What you can’t bend or throw or write on isn’t, in the end, literature.”
Howard Jacobson. More at BBC
From Bookshelf, this B&B, which in this case stands for Book and Bed, an establishment in Tokyo catering to travelers who read. Looks like my house.
“Book And Bed is an ‘accommodation bookshop’. Shared shower, toilet and shower space are available as well as two types of bed, compact and standard. The new hostel targets overseas and out of town travelers. Day rates as well as overnight.”
I love this idea. I am trying to think of a way to incorporate an easy chair and a fridge into the staircase. Then I would be all set (almost).
These are from the bookshelf blog.
The stereotypical knitter is a granny with a cat at her feet who sits by the fire knitting mittens for her grandchildren. Throughout history, however, men dominated the craft and it is only recently that knitting has been thought of as the province of women.
Here is a (totally factual) story from Huffington Post that talks about the history of men and knitting:
“About 200 A.D., Arabian men were fishing for food but they had no way to catch several fish at once. They caught one fish. Then a second fish. And it was like, Geeze, this is slow as a camel. Then one day, perhaps down by the dock, one of the guys was messing with yarn, forming loops in it, and bam! Fishing net. (Other cultures likely invented knitting elsewhere around the world.)
They stuck the net it in the water and caught a boatload of fish. And someone said, “We just invented the fishing net.” And someone else said, “Let’s invent sweaters.”
Then the Middle Ages came and knitting spread like the plague. There were knitting guilds, which were labor unions–and again this is men we’re talking about. The guild’s head honcho would say, “Join us. We’ll protect your income. We’ll give you insurance. We’ll give you benefits. If your wife dies, we’ll help you with the funeral ceremony.” Nice stuff like that.”
Fast forward to 1972 when Dave Fougner thought it was time to bring men back to knitting and The Manly Art of Knitting was published. This book has been revived by Ginko Press. You too can follow along with the book’s directions for knitting saddle blankets and dog beds. Good stuff.
Firearms, fibers, any news or behaviors that make me say, "hmm, let me take another look at this."
I still miss my man, but my aim is getting better.
Gunsmoke and Knitting 