Twenty Years (20) of Dog Parades in Northport (or is it 21?)

Ho-hum. Another day in the bookstore....

What's this? Dogs going by?

While kids look at books, Sarah checks out sidewalk traffic.

Whose car is this? Cool plate!

Anticipation....

Then, somehow, I missed the very beginning of the parade! Missed the dog parade banner coming down the street! Did it mention "20 Years"? I don't know. I'm still working on the calculation myself, starting with the age of my bookstore (22), subtracting the three summers it was in Traverse City (19), adding back the two dog parades I know we missed (2) -- 21 years? I'm confused. Who's got the count?

Never mind. Here come dogs! This year's theme, "Woofstock," was truly inspired -- and inspiring.

Not all of my pictures turned out great, but I'm including a couple fuzzy ones nonetheless, because they are important parts of village life.

Northport Promise

Northport Wildcats!!!

Along the way, with dogs, dogs, dogs, were people marching with a Coming Attraction, the Leelanau UnCaged street fair the last Saturday in September.

The street fair is as much fun as the dog parade -- maybe more, in that it lasts all day long. But right now it's still August, and today was the day Northport went to the dogs. Beneficiaries of this year's parade fees were the Cherryland Humane Society, Black Sheep Crossing, and Silver Muzzle Cottage.

Sarah had a good time watching the parade, especially when she saw dogs she knows, like Laddie and Nessie.

Laddie

Nessie

We were also excited and pleasantly surprised to see Sarah's former groomer, Jamie. She is only Sarah's "former" groomer because she, Jamie, moved down to Grand Rapids. We miss her!

It's Jamie!!!

Omena has a big doggie presence. (Their mayor is a dog.)

And the dogs and hippies just kept comin'

Our librarian and her entourage and the Friends of the Library in the Stanley Steamer took the prize for bending Sixties slogans to their own agenda, and since it's an agenda I share, I loved their signs. 

Big dog makes big shadow!

It isn't a parade without a band

Neighbors and neighbor dogs

I hope someone counted all the dogs in this year's parade -- and then, too, all the dogs like Sarah along the parade route, enjoying the scene from the sidelines. 

Then the parade was over for another year, leaving behind smiles and memories. What a wonderful tradition! In Northport, we love our town, and we love our dogs.

Kirk in t- and bandana

Guest Book Review: THE PERSONALITY PAPERS

The Popularity Papers, by Amy Ignatow (NY: Amulet Books, 2010). Paper, $8.95

Today’s book review comes to you from Cassidy Mork, who will enter sixth grade next week at Northport Public School.

Wow! I just read the most exciting book I’ve ever read in my whole entire life! The first thing I like about the story is when the first couple of pages tell a little bit about the characters in the story--for instance, that Lydia has blonde hair and she wears glasses, she’s a good singer, and she loves ice cream. She wishes she had more style, and she’s tall. Julie, her best friend, is obviously different. Julie is not tall, has brown hair, she is pretty much a good drawer but not really with ears, and she wishes she could fly.

As the story goes on Lydia and Julie try to figure out a name for their little club. They finally figure a name which is called Learn & Improve. Everybody agreed.

Then Lydia, Julie, Melody (her sister in junior high), Gretchen Meyer, Lisa Kovac, Jane Astley, Subie Thomas, Michael Cavelleri, Ross Dennenberg, Jamie Burke and Peters went on a camping trip, and they were all paired in four groups. Then when they were camping in Buck’s Valley Melody’s sister Brigit took all of Melody’s socks and underwear, so Melody kept being called Smelly Melly.

Towards the end of the story Julie and Lydia were talking about Lisa, and she came stomping through, and the girls didn’t want Lisa to know. [I guess you have to read the story to found out how this confrontation is resolved. That’s good, because we don’t want to spoil the story for you before you read it.–pj]

At the end of the story the girls find the coolest people they know.

Cassidy listed the “coolest people” at the end of her review, but I’m leaving that part out—again, so we won’t give away too much of the story for those who haven’t read it yet. Thank you, Cassidy, for reviewing this book for "Books in Northport" readers. I'm glad you enjoyed it!

The Popularity Papers, by Amy Ignatow, introduces fifth-graders Julia and Lydia, whose adventures continue in The Long-Distance Dispatch (#2 in the series) and (#3) Words of (Questionable) Wisdom.

C. S. Lewis Recommended Reading Old Books

The exhaustion of my camera batteries last Saturday was bad timing. Not only did we have a terrific blizzard, with snow blowing horizontally down Waukazoo Street for most of the afternoon, but my charger was back at home, so I couldn’t use the bookstore hours to recharge before the evening performance of “The Magician’s Nephew.” Costumes, makeup, sets, kids I've known for years—photo ops galore, and I missed them all. We were glad to see the play nonetheless. The students did an impressive job inhabiting the C. S. Lewis characters in their own script adaptation of the fantasy novel, and they even managed quite creditable British accents, no mean feat in a little northern Michigan town. As my regular readers know, I am not a fantasy fan, but this production held me enthralled.


C.S. Lewis, I was musing, in The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, went deeper into his topics than the vast majority of writers on the same subjects. What a coincidence, then, when my son sent me a link to text of C. S. Lewis on the subject of reading old books just two days after we’d seen “The Magician’s Nephew.”

If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. - C. S. Lewis

This is exactly what I used to tell my philosophy students. If you try to read Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, even Aristotle, without knowing the earlier philosophers those men read, you are coming into the middle of a conversation with no idea what went before, and much of what is said will seem to come out of nowhere. Not so. What you’re hearing is fully meaningful only in the context of the entire conversation, as response to or elaboration or rejection of earlier ideas. The full conversation is the history of a culture and its ideas.

As for reading old books, however, I would issue a caution which Lewis also articulated: the value of the older works is not that they are more true or more right than works of our contemporaries but that we can more easily see their errors, as well as their truths, and in seeing errors in old books we are more likely to notice those of our own time.

Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we would now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united....

Not everyone approaches old books with careful scrutiny. Early in my bookstore days I was surprised by the number of requests for older history books by people convinced that books written closer to the time of the events covered would be more accurate. Whatever gave them that idea? Generally the history books written while the guns are still smoking tend to be less informative than later works. A participant in events sees them firsthand, true, but from a single perspective; a combination of perspectives, on the other hand, along with documents that later came to light, allows a larger, more balanced overview.

Every time period has partisans for one view over another, and so it is true, as the seekers after old truths are convinced, that different historians in 2011 give different interpretations of earlier times. But the seeker of truth who thinks that partisanship did not exist at the time of conflict is the victim of a strange delusion. Why would there have been conflict at all—how could conflict exist—if people hadn't seen things differently then, too?

P.S. Gerry always pushes my thought further, and her comment below is no exception. Here is a student essay I found online and recommend for its statement of the problems of historical research. I loved these lines from the student's paper: “Historians view the world, hoping to make sense of it. The world, however, does not speak – we do.”

What do the rest of you think?

Season of Light Brings Weighty Thoughts, Too

Sunshine and balmy breezes, warm lake temperatures and blooming flowers—it’s been an earlier and warmer spring this year than what we usually expect. Summer residents and early-season vacationers were thrilled with one of the loveliest ever of Memorial Day weekends. We do have serious thoughts in Northport, however, despite the lightness of the weather.


Memorial Day is our time to remember sacrifices of the past, and that remembrance is important. Last night at graduation, though, I couldn’t help thinking that the shift in perspective from past to future was a good thing, too. I didn’t take my camera this year, knowing that David and I would be sitting on folding chairs rather than in the bleachers, so I have no visual images of the evening. Instead you’ll simply have to picture in your mind the five young men and five young women on stage in their robes; elementary students filing in to sing “Stand By Me” to the graduating class; presentation of diplomas, with hugs exchanged; seniors coming down into the audience to give flowers to their mothers; slide show presenting chubby babies becoming handsome young adults; mortarboards tossed happily into the air; smiling, tear-stained faces all around. There was plenty to hear, too: addresses by Hans Müller, Evan Morgan and Miles Chisolm; Kelly Fischer’s introduction of the commencement address speaker; Sally Viskochil’s surprise reading of Dr. Seuss’s “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” to the class; laughter, applause, whistles and a few sobs.

The evening provided a look back over the course of childhood and school careers, but the ceremony was mostly a looking forward, for the whole community as well as for graduates and their families. Yes, graduation in Northport is very much a community event, and I like the way it follows on the heels of Memorial Day.

Here they are, the Class of 2010:

Amanda Rae Adams
Miles E. Chisolm
Bryton Yolanda Collins
Kelly Marie Fischer
Bailey Jane Hanson
Imani Ashanti Holt
Evan Chase Morgan
Hans Pohaikealoha Müller
Edward Lee Perez
Jason Morgan Tropf

Congratulations and best wishes to all of you from an entire community!

On Sunday evening (7 p.m., Trinity Congregational Church) this year’s Belko Peace Lecture speaker, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, will give our community an opportunity to look farther afield to the global village of which we are also members. “Finding Faith Without Fanaticism” is the title of his address. I need to quote here from the information provided by the Lecture Series committee:

Rabbi Hirschfield is the President of CLAL, the Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a leadership training institute, think tank and resource center committed to religious pluralism and the healthier use of religion in American public life. He has inspired audiences from the Aspen Institute and the Washington National Cathedral, to the Islamic Society of North America and many leading universities and religious institutions. A featured speaker at [the] Parliament of the World’s Religions in both Barcelona and Melbourne, he was recently invited by the governments of the United States and the Republic of Indonesia to speak at the Jakarta Interfaith League.

There is more, but this should be enough to convince you that little Northport is very fortunate to be hosting such a prominent international speaker and that you won’t want to miss his talk. If you need persuasion from another perspective, I can tell you that he has a ponytail, too.

A limited number of Hirschfield’s book, You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right, will be available for purchase at the reception following his presentation.

What on Earth Do Three News Items Have in Common?

SENIOR PROJECTS

Wednesday, May 12, beginning at 6:30 p.m., is Senior Project Night at Northport High School. Senior project is a requirement for graduation with three components: research, product and presentation. The class of 2010 will graduate nine students, so that means, with three sessions running concurrently, that it will be possible for everyone attending to attend a third of the presentations. The evening (I’ve gone most years) is a thrilling evening for students, family and community.

Here are names and project titles for Senior Project Night 2010:

Amanda Adams: Macro Photography: Learning from the Little Things
Miles Chisholm: Battling Great Lakes Invasive Species
Bryton Collins: Poverty & Food Insecurity
Kelly Fischer: Promoting Alternative Energy in Northport
Baily Hanson: Protesting the Captivity of Sea Mammals
Imani Holt: Improving Self-Esteem with Fashion
Evan Morgan: Promoting Northport School
Edward Perez: Heart Healthy cuisine
Jason Tropf: Preserving the Legacy of Northport Athletics

NEW BUZZELLI MURDER MYSTERY

It’s here, it’s here! With Bruce, my helper, off in London on a special birthday trip and summer crowds not yet swarming the peninsula, I’m taking it easy this month and taking off Mondays as well as Sundays. Today, though, I thought I’d show up long enough for the FedEx and UPS delivery trucks to have a chance to bring me packages. Yea!!! There was the box of Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli’s new book, Dead Sleeping Shaman, the third in her Emily Kincaid series. Well, no secret what I’ll be reading in bed tonight!

And here’s another news blast: Emily—oops, I mean Elizabeth!—will be at Dog Ears Books from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, June 11 to meet, greet, sign books and generally entertain, as she always does so well. Buzzelli has twice been a speaker in the Leelanau Township Library summer series. She has also done readings, signings and one writing workshop at Dog Ears Books in previous years. Northport knows her well. I don’t see any conflicts on the Northport calendar, either, so am hoping our village will turn out in force. Naturally, we also welcome friends old and new from out of town, also.

MY NEW BLOG

Yes, I’ve created a second blog, thanks to inspiration from Kathy up in the Keewanaw woods, with her posting about how she doesn’t like to compress images. I always compress for my postings on Books in Northport. Sometimes I’m posting from home, which means dialup. Also, I know a few others (e.g., you know who you are!) are still stuck with dialup most of the time and won’t have time to visit regularly if they have to wait forever for images to load. So.... But--. Why would a second one be different?

I can answer by contrasting the two. This site, Books in Northport, will still be my principal platform for bookstore, community and personal news. (The Dog Ears Books site will continue as my platform to sell special books.) The new blog, A Shot in the Light (it’s okay to think Peter Sellers; I certainly did), will contain no news, no opinions, no reviews, no descriptions. My idea for A Shot in the Light is to let my images speak for themselves. I’ll only be posting one at a time, maximum pixel density, perhaps as few as one a week. I’ll only be putting up what I consider my best photography. Viewers may disagree with what I think is good, and I’m willing to learn from critical comments. In fact, my Greatest Admirer and my Severest Critic (GASC would be David) already had a negative response, so the first comment on my new blog is my own--not exactly defending but explaining. After all, intelligent, discerning minds and eyes can see things differently, yes? Take a look and let me know how you see it.

Pages From My Checkered Past

Where is my camera? Where are my pictures? If the camera and pictures show up, I'll add them later. For now, here are my scattered thoughts (first on present, then on past) and one recent picture, showing my true, perennial age: third grade!

Kathy from Up in the Yoop put up a post about her readership dropping by half when her mood dipped. I had an opposite experience this week on Facebook. It's hard to know what will spark comments, either on a blog or on Fb, but my suggestion that Northport Creek's name be changed to Wildcat Creek (in honor of our local teams) sparked a comet's tail of commentary. Some people had suggestions to propose in place of mine, some liked the current name, some told of older names--it just went on and on. I've had similar experiences on the blog, with some random post that felt very trivial to me generating lots of comments, while my (ahem!) very thoughtful mental meanderings "went south," to use Kathy's phrase.

So now for that backward look, whether anyone wants to follow my thoughts in this direction or not.

--Okay, I found one picture, the one depicting not presence but absence:


One thing not welcoming us back to Northport this year was the original (1993) home of Dog Ears Books, that little shed down at the other end of the block on Waukazoo Street. Ours was a simple beginning: no heat, no phone, no computer, not even insulation or water—just a few bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. David and I sawed boards and put up shelves (I became very handy with an electric screw gun), and when the sign went up—DOG EARS—early summer visitors imagined all kinds of possibilities, one of my favorites being some kind of “fair food,” on the order of elephant ears (but presumably not as large).

There were two sheds, actually, joined together by a false front, making it look, years later, as if a tree were growing up through the building. Not so. The tree grew in the space between the two sheds, but both are gone now, along with the tree. Well, it was time. The property hadn’t been used for years and was looking very derelict, and for me that chapter was closed a long time ago.

In 2003, on the 10th anniversary of Dog Ears Books, I put together what I called a “Nutshell History” (year-by-year highlights, one short paragraph per year), accompanied by photographs, testimonials, and a list of some of my favorite and recommended titles. All this turned up a couple of days ago as I was hunting for some old tax documents. So here today, “in no particular order” (as the list modestly described itself, is the “eclectic assortment of recommended titles...from the bookseller at Dog Ears Books.” I’d add a few more since then, but I still stand by these:

Smith, Betty. A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN; MAGGIE-NOW
Camus, Albert. THE PLAGUE; THE FIRST MAN
Paul, Elliot. THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS
Russell, Franklin. WATCHERS AT THE POND
Paton, Alan. CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY
Chang, Jung. WILD SWANS
Catton, Bruce. WAITING FOR THE MORNING TRAIN
Hubbard, Harlan. SHANTYBOAT
Grahame, Kenneth. WIND IN THE WILLOWS
Morley, Christopher. PARNASSUS ON WHEELS; THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP
Berry, Wendell. JAYBER CROW; HARLAN HUBBARD, LIFE AND WORK
Franck, Frederick. THE ZEN OF SEEING
Coetzee, J.M. DISGRACE
Norris, Kathleen. DAKOTA: A SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY
“Pilgrim, Peace.” PEACE PILGRIM
Richter, Conrad. THE TREES; THE FIELDS; THE TOWN
Austen, Jane. PRICE AND PREJUDICE; PERSUASION; SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
Wolfe. Tom. THE PAINTED WORD
Mosley, Walter. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, ALWAYS OUTGUNNED; WALKIN’ THE DOG
Lovasik, Lawrence G. THE HIDDEN POWER OF KINDNESS
Alexie, Sherman. RESERVATION BLUES
DeToqueville, Alexis de. DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA; JOURNEY TO AMERICA
Tuchman, Barbara. THE GUNS OF AUGUST
Fisher, M.F.K. MAP OF ANOTHER TOWN
Browne, Tom. THE TRACKER
Least Heat-Moon, William. BLUE HIGHWAYS
Richards, Eva Alvey. ARCTIC MOOD
Scherman, Katherine. SPRING ON AN ARCTIC ISLAND
St.-Exupery, Antoine de. THE LITTLE PRINCE; NIGHT FLIGHT
Farley, Walter. All the BLACK STALLION and ISLAND STALLION books
White, T. H. Mistress Masham’s Repose
Fabre, Jean-Henri. Any of his books on insects
Kundera, Milan. THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING; THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
Tannen, Deborah. YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND
Elgin, Suzette Haden. THE GENTLE ART OF VERBAL SELF-DEFENSE
Huc, Abbe. HIGH ROAD IN TARTARY
Mattuck, Israel. JEWISH ETHICS
Dickens, Charles. AMERICAN NOTES
Arnold, Thurman. THE FOLKLORE OF CAPITALISM
Spence, Gerry. THE MAKING OF A COUNTRY LAWYER
Leveson, David. A SENSE OF THE EARTH
Carhart, Thad. THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK
Gopnik, Adam. PARIS TO THE MOON
Estes, Eleanor. All the MOFFAT and PYE books
Strong, Albertine. DELUGE
Van Paassen, Pierre. EARTH COULD BE FAIR; DAYS OF OUR YEARS
Van Loon, Willem Hendrick. LIVES
Brooks, Van Wyck. THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND
Dillard, Annie. PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
Verghese, Abraham. MY OWN COUNTRY
Wylie, Laurence. VILLAGE IN THE VAUCLUSE
Bromfield, Louis. MALABAR FARM; his other farming books, too
Trollope, Anthony. THE WARDEN and all the BARCHESTER series
Bulwer-Lytton. THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII
Norton, Mary. THE BORROWERS; THE BORROWERS AFIELD
Berndt, Henrich. THE TREES IN MY FOREST
Hinton, William. FANSHEN: A DOCUMENTARY OF REVOLUTION IN A CHINESE VILLAGE
White, Theodore. IN SEARCH OF HISTORY; THUNDER OUT OF CHINA
Berenson, Bernard. SKETCH FOR A SELF-PORTRAIT
Beauvoir, Simone de. MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER
Sendak, Maurice. CHICKEN SOUP WITH RICE
Seuss, Dr. HORTON HEARS A WHO
Cameron, Eleanor. THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSHROOM PLANET
Hatch, Richard W. THE CURIOUS LOBSTER
Thompson, William Irwin. AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY
Bracken, Peg. Anything by her, e.g., I HATE TO HOUSEKEEP
Gould, Stephen Jay. Anything by him
Beck, Phineas. CLEMENTINE IN THE KITCHEN
Gendlin, Eugene T. FOCUSING
Kipling, Rudyard. THE JUNGLE BOOKS

To Feel Like a Kid and See Like a Kid, Read Like a Kid

Wednesday morning was unusually busy at Dog Ears Books. We had visits from four teams of summer school explorers. The Small But Mighty, Fox Islanders, Bald Eagles and Crazy Cherries were spending the early part of the day exploring Northport on foot, and the bookstore was one stop along the way. After a brief introduction and time for the kids to explore, each team voted on a book to buy for their school library. The first team was the bounciest, the last pretty subdued, but I think the increasing heat of the morning was responsible for that difference. Anyway, faithful volunteer (read ‘angel’!) Bruce Balas, himself a veteran teacher of 25 years at the American School in London, was on hand to help sort things out, and every team departed with their chosen book and map of Leelanau County, with no backpacks left behind. Fun for all!



Having the kids visit on Wednesday and looking forward to Hillary Lang Porter’s book signing on Saturday has me thinking about children’s books. If you look at my “Books Read” list, you’ll see that right above (i.e., after) Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers comes Louis Slobodkin’s Circus April 1st—and now I realize that I have to add David Small’s That Book Lady to the list, too. Reading (sometimes re-reading) children’s books from time to time refreshes my spirit and keeps me, I hope, from becoming philosophically stale. Oh, who cares! It’s just fun! I like the picture books, and I like the chapter books, too, the ones you can live in for a while, inhabiting the characters’ world. Porter’s The Colors of Beech Hill is one of the latter, its story set right here in Northport, where the author graduated from high school in 1989.

The ruts in the dirt road made it hard to keep up the pace, and I ended up walking my bike up the last section of the road to my favorite spot. On a clear day up here it seemed like you could see the whole world. To the west on Lake Michigan you could plainly see both of the Manitou Islands, way out to Beaver Island, then across the northern part of the bay to the town of Charlevoix. Much closer in you could see the Point, Gull Island, even down to the tip of the Old Mission Peninsula. The trees on the top of this hill were growing so much that there would probably come a time that Old Mission was hidden from view, Billy Winslow said, but not yet. The best part is that you can’t see any buildings at all, not one in the entire landscape. It was like no one had built a house yet, no cherry processing plants, no barns, and no little village next to the water. The trees cover it all up. -- from The Colors of Beech Hill, by Hillary Porter

Since I didn’t grow up in Northport or in any small town, it’s only vicariously that I’ve ever had the experience. (That, by the way, is the same way I’ve had horses—vicariously, through reading.) I’ve noticed, though, that people of every age in Northport, all of them hard workers, still manage to keep a child’s delight in the changing of the seasons, local events and festivals, and all manner of magical, ephemeral moments. No one ever seems to tire of spying a fawn half-hidden in tall grass or a fox crossing the road, loons or cranes, geese or hawks overhead, the parade of blossoms or the progress of the orchards.

So go barefoot for a few minutes today. If you’re near the water, go wading. Lie in the grass and watch clouds. Read a book written for young people and cherish the child who lives on inside you.

Or, to put it another way--and to give me an excuse to post more flower images--be partly cultivated, like the elegant iris, and partly wild, like the happy hawkweed. Am I stretching my point too far? These shots were taken Tuesday evening, St. John's Eve.

Northport Homecoming

A beautiful day for a parade and a game! Go, Wildcats!

Around Town and On the Beach

There’s a lot going on around the village today. Students from Northport School’s yearbook class, under the guidance art teacher Jenny Evans but on their own for this phase of business, were out drumming up advertising for the yearbook. Could anyone even try to resist Anna and Christina? The girls were thrilled to have Dog Ears Books sign up for a full-page ad and willingly posed for a picture. Go, Wildcats! By the way, Homecoming this year is on September 27.

Over on Mill Street, the Willowbrook remodeling is going full steam ahead, and by dint of an extra dog walk I was lucky enough to catch these guys raising a new wall. They weren’t posing, either. In cases like this, timing is everything. My old garden on Nagonaba Street, between Nature Gems (on the corner) and Dolls and More, has gotten some attention lately. Someone took out the old rose of Sharon that died a year ago, I was happy to see, and the big purple asters, so showy this time of year, are obviously doing well.

Out in the wild, along roadsides and in old meadows, asters are blooming, too. To treat myself as well as my dog, I closed up shop early yesterday and took Sarah for a little birthday trip down to Sleeping Bear territory, where she had her first swim in Lake Michigan. You’d think she’d been swimming all her life. Water and sun were warm, crowds nonexistent, breeze glorious. We need to do this kind of thing more often.

Town and Country

Vicariously in New York with Emily (see yesterday’s post), I learned that it was Marcella Hahner, buyer for the Book Section of Marshall Field’s in Chicago, who originally came up with the idea of inviting authors to the store to sign books.

“When I met Marcella only a little over ten years after the establishment of the department, she had built it into the biggest retail book business in the world…. She had established and she maintained her absolute sovereignty over publishers by the artful device of selling more of their books than any other retailer even approached. Every bookseller the country over based his order on the number of volumes Mrs. Hahner had requested.” Who knew? One little woman in the Second City led the way.

While Mrs. Hahner did invite authors to Marshall Field’s Book Section to sign their books, the signings were not generally public events but intimate tea parties held in the buyer’s office. If Mrs. Hahner liked the author (and she usually did) and trusted him (always “him”) around young women, Emily was invited, meeting many famous writers of the era. (So much for those snooty friends of hers who left her out of their dinner dance party, I thought with satisfaction as I read this chapter.) But in 1918 Marcella Hahner inaugurated a Book Fair at the store, with 56 publishers and many live authors. “The authors spoke and autographed their books for thousands of people, most of whom until Marcella brought their attention to the matter had never owned nor particularly wanted to own an autographed copy of anything.”


I had to tear myself away from housecleaning and reading (which was more difficult?) to get up to Northport about mid-afternoon, checking with Bruce on bookstore happenings of the day before making my usual rounds of the village with Sarah. Thanks to the creative and industrious David Chrobak, there are new ladies around town, colorful and stylish, welcoming visitors for the week of the 4th and beyond. Here are a couple of them. (No one ever knows what David will come up with next.) It was a busy late afternoon at Dog Ears Books, too, visiting with and selling books to out-of-town customers and planning with Woody for a show in the gallery in three weeks’ time.

Later, back home, I found a hay crew in the fields, loading wagons with hay bailed only hours before. Yes, the sun shines, so….

We’re all trying to “make hay” this time of year, which reminds me to remind everyone that Saturday is the Promise picnic and silent auction at Marina Park. The Promise scholarship program for Northport graduates is off to a good start and deserves continuing support. Check their website (Northport Promise) for more information and for a list of items included in the auction.