It's time for WHAT?

Mid-county scene, looking north

Looking south

 On the home front

Cucumber vines climbing screen

Parsley going crazy!

Chimichurri on pasta

Cucumber vines have blossomed, and parsley was so bushy and plentiful that I made a batch of chimichurri, tried it on pasta, and recommend the combination. Mixed in avocado the next evening for a tortilla chip dip, and that's good, too.

 

Although daisies are taking their sweet time, I have hopes they will be blooming soon, and meanwhile, I pore over catalogs and books on perennials and dream of paths winding through yard-sized gardens.

 

By the way, have you ever heard of ‘pour-over coffee’? Apparently, it’s a thing. New to me!

 

(That’s the pore/pour lesson. I’ll let sleeping dogs lie for today on lie/lay.)

As for Sunny Juliet, we are varying the tennis ball retrieval game, starting today, so stay tuned!

Always ready...

Now, "Jump!"

My recent, albeit modest stroke of genius

 

You know how you have a brilliant thought while driving or before falling asleep – sometime when it’s too much trouble to stop to write it down – and you think, I’ll remember that. And then so often you don’t? One of those thoughts visited me one evening, like a brightly colored bird that quickly flitted away before my eyes closed, and somehow (this is the miracle) I remembered it the next morning!

 

…I was thinking of the years when Northport was in the doldrums and people who accidently wandered off the M-22 loop would ask in whiny, put-upon voices, “What’s the matter with Northport?” I was sure it was just a matter of hanging on before Northport would turn around, and in the meantime I subbed at the school, picked apples, worked on a garden crew, etc. – all to keep my bookstore afloat.

 

…I was thinking about all the times people had said to me (as if contradiction were unthinkable), “No one reads books any more.” One young father, his toddler riding piggy-back on his shoulders, waved his hands to indicate my array of volumes and told the boy, “Someday all this will be gone.”

 

...I was thinking of when Borders came to Traverse City and what a fabulous bookstore it was (then) and how someone said to me mournfully (as if I had been trying to do something like Borders, when my bookstore idea was so very, very different), “Oh, you just can’t compete with Borders!”

 

Now in 2023 Borders is no more, everyone loves Northport, and people are still reading books. Lots of people! Many even buy books! Hence -- my anniversary motto for Dog Ears Books: 

 

“Disproving the skeptics for 30 years”

 

What do you think? “Three decades” or “30 years”?

(My personal life motto)

 

Authors in Northport

 

Tuesday, July 11, is the first of four evenings in the Friends of the Library (Leelanau Township) Summer Series, with Dave Dempsey kicking off the series this year with Great Lakes for Sale. Remainder of the 2023 series will feature the following authors and books:

 

July 18, Jacob Wheeler, Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World One Child at a Time

 

July 25, Sarah Shoemaker, Children of the Catastrophe

 

August 1, Soon-Young Yoon, Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the UN

 

All four summer author events this year will be held at the Willowbrook on Mill St., each one beginning at 7 p.m. The events are free, and no reservations are required. Books will be available for purchase.

 

Reminders

 

Join Northport booklovers for these events, visit Dog Ears Books Tuesdays through Saturdays this summer, follow “Books in Northport” and share it with friends. Thanks, all! Thirty years!!!

How It Will Be This Year

Warm, dark morning

Warm enough for bare feet

Moonlight through black walnut branches early Tuesday. Dark fading to light behind the eastern woods. Morning in my world—another strangely warm morning, unseasonably warm, given that it’s the first week of December. The other day I saw lilac buds at a neighbor’s house looking as if they were preparing to open--not a good sign if the orchard trees follow suit. But all we can do about the weather is to take what preparations we can for severe storms and then wait and see what comes.

In other areas of life it’s possible to do more. The local committee calling itself “Best for Kids” will once again host a Holiday Bake Sale and Bazaar at the Willowbrook Inn this coming Saturday to benefit the Leelanau Children’s Center. In addition to cookies, cakes, candies, and holiday breads studded with fruit and nuts, there will be vendors offering all manner of handmade craft items and local food products. The sale will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Mill Street.

Dog Ears Books has had a table of books at the bazaar for the past two years, but this year we are participating in a different way. Instead of trying to guess ahead of time what kind of books might be popular as holiday gifts, I’m opening my entire store to benefit the Leelanau Children’s Center. My “annex” to the bazaar will run both Saturday and Sunday, for the convenience of workers and vendors who will be busy at the Willowbrook all day Saturday.

Here’s how it will work:

There will be a table at the Willowbrook for Dog Ears Books, but at that table, instead of books, will be cards for shoppers to bring to the bookstore. (I’ll have a few at the bookstore, also, for anyone who doesn’t make it to Mill Street.) New books and used books, notecards, posters, and calendars—on Saturday and Sunday, anyone making a purchase at my bookstore and filling out a card can direct 20% of dollars spent on anything I have in stock to the Leelanau Children’s Center. My hours on Saturday will be 10 to 5; Sunday hours 11-4.

I’m hoping that holiday shoppers will be encouraged by the wider variety of bookstore inventory this system will make available for the benefit. You can find book treasures in your own hometown, support local business, and support a good cause, all with one visit to 106 Waukazoo Street on Saturday and/or Sunday, Dec. 8-9.

Another reason to stay in town after the Willowbrook closes is that the lights on the big tree on Nagonaba Street will come on Saturday evening. (Do you remember last year?) And of course, if you’ve gone to the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Youth Ensemble Madrigal Concert on Friday night, you’ll already be primed for holidays.

By late afternoon Tuesday the wind was coming from the north again, as it should, and air temperature dropping. Winter is coming back, and that’s okay. That’s the way it should be. (Don't stop here--there's another paragraph following the photo!)

Warmer light, much colder air--can you feel it?

Personal P.S. I must say--. (There’s no “must” about it; you’re being self-indulgent. So what? It’s my blog!) There are lots of times when publicizing local events, even my own bookstore events, diverts me from what I’d rather be writing about if I consulted nothing but the Writer Within. Reality, however, dictates that the Writer Within be nourished by the Bookseller Without and the Community Member-at-Large. Publicity, public service—today they’ve had their turn. In my next post, however, the Writer Within and the Bookseller Without will collaborate, as once again the blogger lets loose with a passionate opinion. Please stay tuned....

Bookish Thoughts

My son recently sent me a link to a news story about desperately cold British pensioners burning their books to keep warm. David, my husband, thought that was an interesting idea and one we should keep in mind for the future, if we need it. Naturally, I hope it won’t come to that, however uncertain the future of bookselling.

Thursday, yielding to temptation with no defense to offer, I left the Leelanau Township Library in Northport with borrowed reading material—as if I needed more, especially this busy week before departure. Crazy, I know. But the Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2009 Special Issue, was entitled “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age,” and the cover featured a photograph of Shaman Drum Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a big “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE” in the front window, so tell me I didn’t have to read that?

Our next stop after the library was the new coffee house in the old but beautifully remodelled Willowbrook building on Mill Street, but it wasn’t until we got back home that I got seriously into the MQR. The diversity of tone in this issue is delicious: the featured symposium is a smorgasbord of reflections on books, reading and the digital revolution. Paul N. Courant (“New Institutions for the Digital Age”), for example, meditated on what the change from printed paper to digital archives means for libraries:

One of the important features of a book is that you can put it down and pick it up again. You can put it on the shelf and return to it, and unless something strange happens it will still be there next year, next decade, next century. It is even more likely to be accessible in the distant future if it’s a library book that was returned to the library.

I might quarrel with Courant over that last sentence. Suppose the librarians decide to de-acquisition the book I go back to find again? I think I’m more likely to be secure of finding the book again if it’s in my own private home library--but then, mine is the perspective of a bookseller (a bookseller who has attended many library sales, I might add), not that of a librarian. I was intrigued by his observation that digital texts, while cheaper to obtain and house than books, also require vigilant maintenance right from the start (“electronic record is subject both to bit rot...and to format obsolescence”), whereas old-fashioned books on the shelves can go 50-100 years without needing any particular care.

Mice crept into at least two articles. Did you know that mice prefer hardcover to paperback books? They like the glue.

David Kirby (“The Traveling Library”) was fascinated to learn that though most of his summer session students in Florence, Italy, did not own e-readers and had no desire to own them, they believed that traditional books would be obsolete in 20 years. Because that’s what they’ve been told? We were told decades ago to expect the “paperless office,” but that hasn’t happened yet.

The piece that stopped time in its tracks for me, though, was “Growth Rings,” by Benjamin Busch. There’s no way I can do it justice with a brief characterization, and when I consider pulling out an excerpt or two, the choice is overwhelming. Because the essay is so complex, I will take a few sentences from near the beginning to indicate the mastery of the writer and the direction of his thoughts:

I wondered how many books and manuscripts, notes and letters, were macerated, recycled, and flattened into new paper. So much language being erased, and new language coated onto the bleached threads. Where does that first record go? In the forests, later growth rose, nourished by the soil made of rotted trees that struggled first on the bedrock. In this endless circulation of dead matter, where is the first language? If you look closely enough at a page of a book until the smooth paper is exposed to be a tangle of broken wood, could you see the dents on those pieces of fiber where other words had once been imprinted on them? Were there yet traces of pens marking ideas into notebooks? Were all the first thoughts and last words there?

Reflections on parents and their books and writings, along with the author’s time spent in the woods, along a stream, as well as his sense of books as “trees pressed thin,” his love for books as objects, cast a spell over me as I read.

The writer will die, the reader will die, and the mice will come for the papers they left in boxes. We will all be covered with a blank white sheet. But there will be a shelf somewhere where the book will survive. Someone will walk into the empty room, blow the gathered dust from it, sit, and begin reading in the light of a window. The book will change what they see outside. Then the reader will consider the placement of the book and the book will remain, again, where it is placed.

Recall that this was a feature Courant also had noted about books: Put a book on the shelf, and you can come back to it. It will not be erased from the shelf’s memory. It will not expire and be deleted. If it is your book and if you choose, you can take it down from the shelf, wrap it up, take it to the post office and send it to a friend. The book you own is yours to give.

I am not arguing with anyone who prefers to read electronic texts rather than to own books. To each his own. Different people, different priorities. As for me, though, I choose books, day after day, now and for the rest of my life. I would not be myself without them.

This is, by the way, my 600th post since I began "Books in Northport." The milestone almost slipped past me, but I caught myself just in time.