Sunday, February 27, 2011

Grand day out

(If this comes off as a bit subdued relative to how it might actually be, I'm sort of tired. I spent a couple hours today serving as "pudding stick"* at church and I'm sort of worn out)

(*I seem to remember reading somewhere that in Colonial times, an unmarried woman (in those days, usually a woman who just wasn't engaged yet) who served punch or coffee at a reception was called "pudding stick" but a quick Google search does not turn up that term. Perhaps I imagined it. I don't know. But that's my usual role at receptions (well, that, and lifting the heavy trays of stuff that the older women with arthritis in their wrists don't trust themselves to lift))

I started off fairly early yesterday. A person could, I think, spend an entire day (from when stores opened at 10 until 5 pm or even later) just in downtown McKinney if you went and shopped every place. (And especially if you went and got a hair cut, or nails done, or any of the "spa treatments.") As it is, I tend to skip the clothing shops and the really FANCY antiques stores (there are several), and stick to the gifty-type places and the antiques shops that sell more "vintage" and less "true antique" stuff.

But I find plenty of things as it is:

pottery stuffs

The rabbit is very pleasing in a tactile sense - about the size of your hand, and very smooth and rounded. It's going to be part of the eventual Easter decorating I do on my mantel this year.

And I decided I had to have the cottage teapot - that's another one for my collection now. I think I have five or six, if you could the little sugar-and-creamer set and the salt and pepper shakers in that form. That will probably be my summer mantel.

And I liked the little plaque. On the back it's stamped "Hand painted in Italy," so I don't know if it's a piece of souvenirware or if it was made there and imported over here. But I like it. I haven't decided where to put it up just yet but it will match just about anywhere in my house.

I did eat lunch at Churchill's - it was an an interesting and rather atmospheric place. (The real bar, I guess, is upstairs...they also broadcast European soccer matches up there. In the restaurant proper, where I ate, it was a lot quieter). They had a lot of Queen Elizabeth II memorabilia up on the walls, and the ceiling was dark and low, with beams. I chose one of the high tables that had tall stools at them; there was also a sort of banquette along one wall with several tables, and a big family-style table in the middle of the room.

I ordered something called the Sir Winston Churchill club sandwich - ham, turkey, lettuce, tomato, bacon, and a hard-boiled egg cut up on it. I would not have thought to put a hard-boiled egg in a meat sandwich, but it was good. The sandwich also had a lemon mayonnaise on it (not too much, either, which was good) and the whole combination was just good to eat. I also ate most of the fries (or, I should call them, "chips") that came with it because they had malt vinegar out on the tables. (I prefer malt vinegar on fried potatoes to catsup. I guess vinegar used to be a more common condiment; I remember one of the early, early Nero Wolfe novels has Archie make a disparaging comment about how Fred Durkin put vinegar on all his food... in a later book, that changed to catsup.)

After that, I did a bunch more shopping. Loco Cowpoke yielded a birthday present (various hot sauces and a chili mix) for my brother. (He can be hard to buy for, but as I said once before, I think that some kind of "specialty" food that you know the recipient will enjoy makes an excellent gift, because (a) they can use it up and don't have to find a place to put it and (b) if they really decide they DON'T want it, they can usually re-gift it to someone.)

I also bought some books.

Out of Doors in the Holy Land

I've read some of van Dyke's essays (He's probably best known today for the story, "The Fourth Wise Man,") and this looked pretty fascinating - a trip through the Holy Land in an era before hotels, before easy transportation, even really before cars. (The copyright date in the book is 1908. More than 100 years old, which amazes me a little. And yet - it's in fantastically good shape. I will say I find a lot of pre-1920s books seem to have lasted better than more recent books; I think it has something to do with the formulation of the paper. I think the paper back then was more prone to be "acid free," and then for a period starting around WWII, the paper was more acidic (I have some WWII era paper backs that are crumbling to dust), and now, just recently, many publishers have realized the importance of acid-free paper again. A lot of the scholarly books I buy have a little note in them to that effect - some even somewhat smugly state, "This is a *permanent* book")

It's actually an ex-library book, apparently: it's stamped "Nellie Davis Library" and has a small pocket that could have held a check-out card. But it's in remarkably good shape so if it circulated, it must have been taken very good care of.

Besides wanting to read it, I find it just an incredibly beautiful book. I love that cover decoration.

More old books:

new old books

The one on the bottom is recipes, ostensibly from some of San Francisco's famous restaurants. A lot of them are ethnic recipes (I think there's a Kibbe recipe in there, and a yakisoba.) One or two I might want to try, but a lot of times the cookbooks I buy are more for the fun of looking at them than from actually cooking from them.

The soil book is almost 100 years old - it's copyright 1913. (And again: in excellent shape). I bought it, in part, because I wanted to see how much had changed between now and then in the teaching of soils. (A quick thumb-through suggests: not as much as I had thought.) Another interesting thing about the book: it belonged to J. W. Allen, who gives his (I presume) address as K. S. A. C. Box 498. I'm assuming that's Kansas State Agricultural College.

Also, the book is of a series edited by Liberty Hyde Bailey. I'm familiar with that name - he was a fairly well-known botanist in the first half of the 20th century. He was the first to talk about "cultivars" of plants, and he was instrumental in re-introducing Mendel's work on genetics.

But I know him best for the jocular name my mother said students of her generation (which was, actually, a generation of botany students after his death, but his textbooks were still used) referred to him as: "Free Skin Bailey."

Because of "Liberty Hyde," get it? (I suspect the nickname was found funny because it sounded a bit like something more ribald than it actually was...)

The top book on the stack just looked interesting to me. It was $3, so I figured even though I'd never heard of the author, it was worth a try. It's about a young British man who winds up in a (fictional) Middle Eastern country ("Media") and apparently winds up working for an oil concern. It just looked kind of intriguing. (One of my dad's friends - now deceased - worked for one of the British oil companies in Libya, in the days before Gadafi. He had all kinds of interesting stories, and it's from John that I learned you NEVER show a person in an Arabic culture the bottom of your shoe or your foot, as that is seen as an extreme insult - sort of saying "You are even less than the dust below my feet" is how he presented it. Which is why you see video of protesters there beating shoes on pictures of (a few years back) Saddam Hussein, and more recently, Mubarak and Gadafi.)

It wasn't until I got the book home and started flipping through it that the really curious and interesting thing revealed itself:

book from baghdad

Where the book was originally purchased. It was printed in the UK (The author himself was a Brit, someone living and working in Iraq), but this copy was originally purchased in Baghdad. (The copyright date is 1955. I have no idea what was going on in Iraq then but obviously there were bookstores selling British books).

This is why I love buying used books so much. To sit and imagine the path a book might have followed, the hands it might have passed through, on its way to me.

My guess - which I think is not entirely unreasonable - is that an oilman in Iraq bought it, and either he was a Texas oilman who then came back home with the book, or he was a Brit, and this is part of the library of books that the owners of Morningstar Treasures (where I bought it) purchased from the estate of a British man (if that's the case, then I have some of his other books, as well - I bought a number of the ones that the owner specifically told me had come as part of the library they bought).

But it's amazing to me to think that that book, first printed in Britain, then passed through Baghdad - and then to Texas, where the exchange of $3 put it into my hands so I can read it.

There are some other things I bought - some yarn and some fabric and one rather silly and amusing thing - but I think pictures for those will come later.

2 comments:

Lydia said...

Happy Birthday!

Those books are amazing.

Anonymous said...

Few years ago I happened to read biography of Agatha Cristie; the interesting part, which I didn't know about before, was her life with her second husband, an archeologist, in the Middle East and on Iran/Iraq excavation sites. Apparently, between wars there was a sizable expat Brit community in that "part of the world", as they say. She then included her impressions and memories of that surrounding in several books, detective stories and literary fiction (which she wrote under a pseudonym).
I like your rabbit...it sounds like you had a pretty nice birthday.