Nature, Art, and Artifact

Last Sunday was what will have been my last Sunday away from the bookstore for the next two months. I used to begin my 7-day-a-week schedule with Memorial Day weekend, but June Sundays in Northport are quiet, (this was true even last year, when the post-Memorial Day dropoff in visitors did not occur, for the first time in my memory), and I decided I needed the time at home. Grass will not be growing as fast in July and August. 

Okay, decision taken. But on my last Sunday at home I didn’t stay home all day.

We had to attend the annual St. Wenceslaus rummage sale, for one thing, and I found several things I really needed – pint canning jars, wooden clothespins (one never has too many), and a nice, big laundry basket. I also bought five or six books, for us and for the shop. Then there were the indulgences – two (yes, two) cheese graters (sturdier than the ones I had at home), an irresistible set of four table napkins, and some other small item that escapes my mind at the moment. (Oh, a steamer basket.)

After the sale, we continued to Lake Leelanau for coffee and so I could pick up a bag of sugar at NJ’s. But then, home ... for lunch outdoors ... and to hang laundry on the line. I’d made a commitment, though, to attend the artist-in-residence lecture at 1:30 in Leland, so down the highway I went. Indoors. On a beautiful, sunny June Sunday. And I was glad to be there.

Holly Wren Spaulding is the first nonvisual artist to be awarded the artist-in-residency at Leland’s Old Art School since the program’s inception. My husband was the first artist-in-residence a decade ago, and most of those selected have been painters. But Holly Wren Spaulding is a poet. Words are her medium. Spaulding’s exhibit at the Old Art Building is a group of poems, the whole entitled “Lost Lexicon.”

Her inspiration for these poems was learning that roughly fifty words were to be cut from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, largely words having to do with nature and the outdoors, to make room for words children hear more frequently, many having to do with new technologies. It is in this context that Spaulding sees her work as a poet to be one of conservation.

The poet knew she wanted these poems done on letterpress, and initially she thought to hire someone to do the printing.

The letterpress artist (‘operator’ as a noun felt all wrong there!) contacted, however, offered instead to teach the poet her craft. And so Holly composed lines of type – actual, physical letters of poured lead – and impressed her words on sheets of handmade paper. The paper used is no longer available, the company that made it out of business. There was a display with a few lines of type and a little sign saying, “Please touch.” I did -- and felt suddenly near tears. Am I overly attached to words? To the physical world? Perhaps both, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Holly’s chosen words were names of plants and animals. On the walls where paintings are usually shown, small poems on sheets of handmade paper were presented to visitors. It was all (as an acquaintance said years ago when she became the mother of twins) very physical – natural objects, physical artifacts, material art.

The “Lost Lexicon” poem cycle may be available in future as a book. For now we still have Pilgrim, Spaulding’s 2014 work published by Alice Green & Co., and in that small, sweet book you will find the same poetic sensibility and feel the same gratitude at being able to hold the poet’s work in your hands, the book a physical object. 

Listen—The Past is Not Finished Speaking

Today, Friday, was another wild Up North morning!

My background growing up was hardly deprived. It’s true we only had a single bathroom for two adults and three children, didn’t have television until after I started school, and our vacations were limited in early years to visiting grandparents, in later years to camping in state parks. But my sisters and I had music lessons, and the whole family sang in our church choir. Thanks to violin lessons from 4^th grade through high school, I also played in an excellent series of school orchestras and enjoyed travel with the orchestra to regional and state music competitions, the National Music Festival in Enid, Oklahoma, and, in high school, a cultural exchange with a high school orchestra from Toronto, Ontario.

We sang

Born in South Dakota, I grew up in Illinois, only 45 miles from the great city of Chicago. My family made annual trips to the Brookfield Zoo and the Shedd Aquarium. Occasionally we went into the city for a musical. (I particularly remember seeing and hearing the stage performance of “Camelot” with my family.) There were orchestra trips to Chicago, also, usually to Orchestra Hall, and beginning in 6^th grade there were many school field trips to the Field Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Science and Industry. One summer our family joined with another family to drive downstate to visit Lincoln’s boyhood home of New Salem and his later, more elaborate house in Springfield, the state capital. The outhouse in the back yard in Springfield was particularly fancy, as I recall. 

We read (and I wrote) poetry

My parents loved poetry and opera. There were always books and records in our home. One area of culture, however, was pretty much completely absent, except for its appearances in our educational books, and that was visual art. My painter/sculptor husband can hardly believe that I did not visit the Art Institute of Chicago as a young person. I guess it just didn’t occur to any of us. Oddly, although I dated an art student the summer after my high school graduation, and we made at least one trip together into the city, we never went to the Art Institute. We had dinner with some cousins of his and went to a movie. Or did we go and I don't remember it? Is that possible?

But the only visual art I knew was from books

At any rate, as far as I recall, it happened that my first visit to the Art Institute of Chicago came fairly late in life. It also happened that I went alone. I didn’t expect an extraordinary experience. After all, hadn’t I seen pictures of famous paintings in books all my life?

I was completely unprepared.

The painting that turned the tide for me was a small Monet, probably smaller than two feet across inside its elaborate gold frame. It was a very “ordinary” landscape, in terms of what was depicted, and it didn’t look that different from other works by the same artist that I’d seen in books for years. But here was the canvas only inches from my face. The artist’s brush strokes were visible, not as lines in a reproduction but with dimension and mass. The artist’s hand had labored over this very object before my eyes.  (And I cannot present here an original image! You can't have that online!)

For the longest time, I couldn’t move from the spot. It was all I could do to hold myself together and not burst into wracking sobs. That’s how moving the experience was. And my response took me completely by surprise. I hadn’t expected it at all.

You have to understand that the way the painting affected me had nothing to do with its monetary value, of which I hadn’t a clue. That the artist was world-renowned was a factor, because, after all, if I hadn’t known his name and images before, there wouldn’t have been that huge difference between reproductions of famous paintings and the one small, modest, original painting on the wall before me. Suddenly, for the first time, I felt the artist himself close to me, a real person, someone whose world I shared, though he was long dead and though our paths would never have crossed in life had he still been alive.

That’s the best I can do to explain why I respond the way I do to old books and ephemera, which are not one-of-a-kind items like original paintings but still, for me, carry the sense of having been touched and held and felt meaningful by other human beings, often no longer among the living. For instance, a friend sent two little leatherbound graduation programs from the University of Michigan, Class of 1913, asking me to sell them for him.

Leather binding

Title page

Hovering over the date, for me, is the Great War, World War I, which began the following year. Could these graduates see it coming? Next year will be the 100^th anniversary of this particular graduating class. Who remembers them today? Great-grandchildren?

Beginning of roster, Class of 1913

These are objects for which I can’t help but feel a certain tenderness. Look at the names, the lovely old script. Imagine their youth and hopeful anticipation of the future. Now that future is past. But looking at these documents, one takes in imagination the perspective of ninety-nine years ago and shares that happy day. Even if all the information in these little booklets were available online, would seeing it on a screen evoke the same feelings as holding the objects? For me it would not.

Other old books, originally printed in greater numbers at the time of their publication, may have wider historical significance and less personal feeling to them, but they still carry me back to the past in ways that the bare "information" they contain could never do. But I'm going to save that topic for another time because all this shifting about from my own younger days to my middle age to the time of the Impressionists and then to Ann Arbor nearly a century ago has got my head spinning. And you thought a life among books was sleepy and dull?

Books for Looks?

This was our Saturday afternoon homecoming. Can you blame us for staying home on Sunday with books, magazines and old newspapers?

A friend who braved the weather yesterday to visit Dog Ears Books brought me a section of the New York Times from earlier this month. For those of you who missed the article my friend knew would interest me, “Selling a Book by Its Cover,” you can find it online here.


The idea is that a well-stocked library is part of the design of a house. It’s part of interior decoration:

Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.

It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé....

Not all clients rule out the possibility of reading their home décor--some, for instance, want only books in English for that very reason—but others are happy to have stacks of books all wrapped in white (or black) as “design elements” in a room where nothing is left to chance, presumably in a house where every tschoschke and its position on a table has been carefully planned. (I guess some people really live like this.) My friend was appalled and thought I would be, too. Well, I can’t see much value in books as nothing more than stacks of white or black, but shelves of real, readable books? Maybe someone will read them—if not the people who paid for the house, then their guests or their grandchildren.


But are we, as one trend-spotter in the article claimed, turning codices (the old word codex is now new again, distinguishing a printed, bound book from an e-book) into fetishes? Fetish! That’s pretty loaded language. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing and making an argument, I looked around my own house and came up with more questions. Why do we photograph natural objects and put those photographs on our walls? Why do we (some of us) have stones and shells and animal bones on our bookshelves, along with the books. Is that small mammal skull a fetish? Those deer jawbones? (Where did my deer jawbones get to, anyway?) Is there something all of these objects on shelves have in common?


[Caveat, disclaimer, disclosure, whatever: There has never been an interior decorator involved in our house. I probably don’t need to say so. Surely our books and bookshelves speak for themselves. Just remember that that’s beside the point, okay? Don’t get distracted! What do books, shells, stones and skulls have in common?]

Here’s what I think. We are physical inhabitants of a physical world and also spiritually connected both to one another and to other aspects of the world, and so we bring into our individual home spaces some of the objects from the larger world that make that larger world our home, too. This stone connects me to a beach covered now by snow and ice. A walk on another beach hundreds of miles away turned up this shell. Finding jawbones of a deer down by the creek years ago, I felt my connection to an individual animal I might never have seen but who was, for a while, a neighbor, and the little raccoon (possum?) also was another being like us, once warm and alive, needing food and shelter. Like these animals, we will one day lose our warmth and life, but even then, like the stone and the shell and bones, we will leave some traces behind.


Every book on the shelf contains human life. Traces, lives, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, events. Readers and non-readers alike sense that books connect us to other human beings in our own and in earlier times, every book a product of other inhabitants of our home, this earth. Wanting them around us, it seems to me, is recognition of their value. Whether or not it constitutes fetishism, I leave for others to decide.

I am fairly well convinced, though, that I need to make crisp new dust jackets for the 25-volume set of the complete works of Mark Twain in my bookshop, its covers worn and faded by the years. A lot of people do judge books by their covers--at least, the cover gives them their first impression--and to many the look of the books on their shelves is important, so Mark Twain needs a facelift. Unless someone comes in to buy the set before I get around to the beautification project. And I have all those stones and shells and bones to handle and rearrange before I start making dust jackets. First things first.