From Happy Holidays to War and Back Again

We needed a little more Christmas at Dog Ears Books, where I have been quite frustrated over cheap strings of tree lights that last only one year. They don't cost much, it's true, but they are turning into mountains of electronic waste, and I can't justify contributing any more to the heap, although there are only a few bulbs that remain lighted near the top of my tree. But here, you see? Marjorie Farrell brought in two small artificial table trees, and we spent a pleasant part of the early morning decorating them with her handmade ornaments.


The little stockings and hearts and such are bits Marjorie rescued from an old holiday sweater found in a thrift store. She felted them and turned them into beautiful decorations.


She used to make these paper stars from marbled paper but to avoid the harmful chemicals used in marbling she switched to plain paper. Another friend stopped in and, admiring the stars, asked if Marjorie would be giving a star-making demonstration. She hadn't planned to. The plan was and still is that she will demonstrate furoshiki wrapping this coming Saturday, but now there's a possibility she can show how to do the stars, too. Time will tell if she can get together everything she needs this far from her craftmaking studio in Woodstock, New York. The ornaments on these trees are available for purchase, however, leaving you more time for baking cookies and writing cards.

If you're wondering how war comes into the picture, it comes obliquely. You see, while this blog feeds regularly on Sarah’s cuteness and on the many books that enrich my life (and, I hope, the lives of my customers), it also feeds at times on other blogs. Occasionally, also, I contribute to another blog, the Bookshop Blog, which you can find in the list in the right-hand column, and today I was rewarded with a surprise there. An author whose book I had mentioned left a comment on the post. You can read the post and the author’s comment here. The book is Truce, by Jim Murphy, about the Christmas Eve truce that took place during World War I.

But now, it's been a long day and I'm tired, so let's close with the ornamented trees. There, that looks like Christmas!

November Visit to Wisconsin

Two Rivers, Wisconsin, with a population of 13,000 was hit hard by the economic downturn. A “stop on the way to Door County,” what does the town has to offer that is uniquely its own, besides their claim to be the original home of the ice cream sundae? Well, there is the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, housed in the old factory building that manufactured wood type for so long, and it’s the only wood type museum in the entire world.

Five years ago, returning through Wisconsin to Michigan after my father’s funeral in Illinois, David and I stopped overnight in Two Rivers. It was late, we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and in the morning, poking around the older parts of town, we happened on the Wood Type Museum. Never having heard of it before, I was enthralled by the very idea, but it was Sunday, and the museum wouldn’t be open for several hours, and we had many miles to travel.

Thus I must admit that my visit this November (2010) was made via a DVD called “Typeface,” brought back by friends who made the trip and did not miss the museum. It isn’t the same as being there and having an opportunity to run my hands over the carved blocks, but it’s better than nothing.

Wood type was the first Hamilton product, and it was their only product for the first ten years. With a quality product and a lower price than anyone else in the business, Hamilton was able to put its largest competitors in New York and Chicago out of business (and then, naturally, doubled their own prices). In the hey-day of letterpress printing, big posters and billboards demanded wood type, as very large letters could not be cast in metal. It was a marriage of machine work and handcraft.

Then in the 1960s came offset lithography, and out went letterpress printing. Mountains of type must have been discarded all over the world. What was it good for? Who needed it? And then came computer graphics and printing.

Now letterpress printing is making a comeback for the same reasons that other “outdated” crafts and ways of doing things are returning. There is something beautiful and real about it that can’t be duplicated by a computer. The Hamilton Wood Type Museum offers workshops year-round by print artists from all over the world. Poetry and letterpress are a heavenly partnership made right here on earth. Letterpress books and letterpress wedding invitations carry high value and cachet in niche markets.

It’s strange, really, that this way of printing, which has little to do with the majority of books, should fascinate me so. It’s stranger still that I learned what goes on in the museum and elsewhere in the letterpress world by watching a DVD on my computer. I would rather have been there. I’d like to go back to Two Rivers and spend time in that museum. I’d like to visit that Chinese restaurant again, too, and spend more time along the old docks and check out the farm museum and have an ice cream sundae. Can’t believe how much I missed in that little town the only time I was there....

I Can Identify With This Thought

The experience of centering was one I particularly sought because I thought of myself as dispersed, interested in too many things. I envied people who were “single-minded,” who had one powerful talent and who knew when they got up in the morning what it was they had to do. Whereas I, wherever I turned, felt the enchantment: to the window for the sweetness of the air; to the door for the passing figures; to the teapot, the typewriter, the knitting needles, the pets, the pottery, the newspaper, the telephone. Wherever I looked, I could have lived.

- M. C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

Chance Encounter, Lovely Craft, Common Names

I met Mary Van Arsdel from St. Petersburg by chance on a semi-wild (i.e., not yet developed) bit of land near Aripeka, Florida, in late March. It was my dog Sarah, a sociable canine, who introduced us. Later in the day David and I were driving another area of the shore, and I saw Mary a little way off the side of Osowaw Boulevard. “There’s Mary!” (Someone I know!) We stopped so I could invite her back to the house for a cold beer, and she showed me one of her recent baskets, along with bullrushes and sweetgrass she’d gathered that day.




The next day I had an e-mail from Mary:

“Today was a busy day, but I managed to hang the Black Needlerush (Bulrush) on the line in my backyard. The East sun dries one side and the West sun the other and will take about 2 months to turn a chestnut color. It is hard to believe that a day’s work only yielded ½ bucket. I enjoy harvesting it and it is good exercise. However, this is the last of the Bulrush that I will harvest until next winter.”

This lady, a data analyst by profession, is nothing if not devoted to her craft.

What goes by the common name “sweetgrass” in the South is not the same as our northern Michigan plant. Ours is Hierochlöe odorata, theirs Muhlenbergia filipes or Muhlenbergia capillaris, and while sweetgrass basketry here in Leelanau County has a Native American ancestry, that in South Carolina, where many are drawn by a strong regional tradition, traces its roots to West Africa by way of the Gullah people. What Mary calls bullrushes, by the way, is what I have called sawgrass in my winter posts from Florida’s Gulf coast.

Southern sweetgrass basket-makers increasingly find their supply of raw natural materials threatened and diminished by development, and one solution many of them are turning to is growing their own. Mary has planted in her backyard sweetgrass purchased from Karl Ohlandt, a landscape ecolopgist. Here’s more on Karl’s involvement in keeping sweetgrass from becoming extinct in South Carolina.

Mary lives in Florida at present but told me quite a bit about the South Carolina basket community and the stretch of Hwy 17 where basket-makers hawk their wares. The Gullah basket tradition there is over 300 years old.

Wildflowers, weeds, grasses, trees—plants of every kind and type have names by which they are known in different regions of the U.S. One bookstore customer today told me she is just getting interesting in herbal remedies and cooking and realizes she has to be careful about the plants she gathers. Sometimes, I told her, the name by which you know a plant depends on what your grandmother called it.


And then, of course, sometimes we choose the common names we like the best. My friend Laurie likes dog-tooth violet for the flower I prefer to call troutlily. Its Latin name, the one known around the world to distinguish it from every other plant, is Erythronium americanum--a unique identifier, thus very important, but not nearly as intimate as the common names. Another common name for this wildflower is adder's tongue. Read more about it here.


This is the season for all the wonderful spring woodland wildflowers. Later the forest canopy will fill in, Lake Michigan will no longer be visible through the trees, and few blossoms will remain on the deeply shaded forest floor. All the more reason to get out in the woods now, while the getting is good....