Each Little World

Clare Leighton

When I first became interested in gardening in the mid-1970s, there were few books on the subject being published in the U.S. Thus most of my early garden book were all purchases from second-hand bookshops. My favorite local source was Paul's Books on State St. here in Madison, a model of everything one wants in such a shop: tons of titles, knowledgeable staff, wood floors and shelves, and a window filled with plants, art and alluring titles.

One of my favorite finds from Paul's is "Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle," written and illustrated with wood engraving by Clare Leighton. I'm fortunate that I happened upon a 1935 first edition for only $8.95. The reasonable price reflects the fact that there is a hand-written inscription inside the front cover: Carrie Ashton Johnson from Bertha / August 24th, 1936. (Any readers recognize those names? An aunt or grandmother from Wisconsin, perhaps?)

 

 

I mention "Four Hedges" — the opening chapter is pictured above — because the book has just been re-issued by Little Toller Books, an imprint of Dovecote Press which re-publishes classic titles about nature and rural life. You can find used copies on Amazon or buy it new (free shipping) from the UK Book Depository for only $15.26. 

 

When Leighton wrote "Four Hedges" she was a novice gardener but a highly skilled artist. I admit that I have only ever read bits and pieces of the text over the years. Though it's delightful, it was Leighton's wood engravings that spurred me to purchase the book. For much of his art career my husband has done wood cuts and wood engravings, so the book seemed like a must for our garden library — and the perfect gift for him.

The Jan./Feb. issue of the magazine "Antiques" featured an excellent article about the illustrations Leighton did for the Wedgwood china company in the late 1940s. The firm commissioned a set of 12 engravings depicting New England industries to be reproduced on a series of Wedgwood plates. The project took three years of research and execution. 

The scenes Leighton chose could be considered farewell messages as they depict American life on the cusp of major changes. The images on the plates resonate strongly with me because they show industries that were also once critical to Wisconsin: ice cutting, cranberrying and logging. We are still a major producer of cranberries and lumber. 

This is the back of the plate pictured above. Anyone who has seen white pines of almost any size or age can understand Leighton's description and just imagine those ancient forests that went sailing around the world. 

Support Wisconsin libraries on March 22

March 22 is Library Legislative Day, a chance for users of Wisconsin public libraries to let our legislators know we believe in — and support — libraries and the services they offer. For many of us, the tight economy means we are using our libraries more than ever. From Bayfield's classic Carnegie Library (directly below) to Madison's up-to-the-minute Sequoya branch, we are fortunate to have wonderful libraries in our state, offering community meeting space, education and entertainment via books and electronic media, on-line job searching and general internet access. 

Gov. Walker's budget includes provisions that would harm state libraries, in particular the sharing system that benefits both libraries and users. The budget would remove a requirement "established in 1972 to ensure municipalities can't slash services and book budgets while taking advantage of the resources of neighboring libraries," according to an email press release from the Madison Public Library sent to library patrons. The budget also includes about a ten percent cut in state funding for libraries. It's obvious what effect these items will have on Wisconsin libraries. 

The library suggests a number of ways that folks who support their mission can help.

• March with library supporters from Olin Terrace to the State Capitol here in Madison beginning at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 22. Meet at the Olin Terrace entrance to Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
• Participate in LIbrary Legislative day online.
• Register to attend the other activities that are part of Library Legislative Day. 

These events are co-sponsored by the Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association and the Wisconsin Library Association. If you can't make it to any of the events on Tuesday, you might want to sign up for updates that will keep you informed about how you can help our libraries. I just signed up so I can tell you that it's quick and very easy. 

The books are back!

We're down to the "punch list" in our remodeling project. That's the list of all the little bits and pieces that need to be dealt with by the contractor before a job is finished. We're close enough to being done that we've started on the fun jobs: planning where to put our favorite artworks and decorative objects, and unpacking the 34 boxes of books we moved out of the old library and re-shelving them in their new setting.

We knew we'd have enough room for all those books but I suggested we discard the equivalent of two shelves worth of titles — about ten percent — as we unpacked. That would give us space to buy more books and it would allow us to combine volumes on a given subject that were previously scattered around the house. What a pleasure to discover old friends and also to admit that we've moved beyond some titles, subjects, obsessions. But looking at the rows of cookbooks, books on textiles, costume, interior design — it's clear some subjects will always be favored.

This weekend we hope to move the couch and the big Chinese armoire that holds the TV and other electronic media back into the room. Let the fun begin! 

I put down a throw to keep cardboard boxes of books from getting the new carpet dirty. The carpet is un-dyed wool in a tweedy-gray made of all the natural colors of fleece. Wonderful on bare feet. The new shelves are 44 inches high and made of cherry. 

A Reliable Wife

Since Robert Goolrick's novel, "A Reliable Wife," is all about deception, readers can start off by not trusting the pretty, woodsy scene on the book's cover to depict the winter hidden inside these pages. Nor should you trust that the spouse in the novel is going to live up to the title. As it turns out, none of the book's main characters are reliable. And it's the labyrinthian twists and turns the reader must make to ferret out the truth that make this story such a fascinating read. 

 

 "A Reliable Wife" is a Gothic tale of lies, lust, unrequited passions, and murder. The backdrop for most of the story is a fictional rural community in Wisconsin — in the winter. The date is 1907/08 which places it firmly in the timeframe of "Wisconsin Death Trip," Michael Lesy's classic 1973 illustrated portrait of small-town life gone mad. Lesy peopled his book with a selection of photographic portraits produced by Chares Van Schaick between 1890 and 1910, along with newspaper accounts of ghastly murders, suicides, failures, foreclosures, fires and all manner of sad and tortured lives. Goolrick encapsulates the era in one brilliant sentence: "Every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary." 

We own three copies of "Death Trip," and my husband has used it as inspiration for paintings and woodcuts, so I instantly recognized it as the novel's subtext. Later, I discovered that Goolrick has been fascinated with the book — and owned a copy — for just about as long as us. You don't have to be familiar with "Death Trip" to enjoy Goolrick's book, but I must admit that having Van Schaick's images in mind makes the novel even richer. 

 

Goolrick lives in NYC but he clearly knows Wisconsin, and his depiction of it is spot on. I was captivated by his description of the winter landscape from the very first page where I read:

"It was not snowing yet, but it would be soon, a blizzard by the smell of it. The land lay covered already in trampled snow. The land here flew away from your eyes, gone into the black horizon without leaving one detail inside the eye. Stubble through the snow, sharp as razors. Crows picking at nothing. Black river, frigid oil."

 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The reliable wife of the title, Catherine Land, is a mail-order bride who comes to wed a wealthy businessman, Ralph Truitt, who's looking for companionship, not romance. He's had romance, passion and despair with his first wife and hopes to redeem himself by finding his son from that disastrous earlier marriage. It's a long time before we know what Catherine is looking for, where she's been and why she really answered Ralph's newspaper advertisement.

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The book is complex and layered, revealing the story and the characters sometimes in tiny fragments, and others in shattering bomb-blasts. This is a story filled with sensuality, from the details of fashion and fabric to "foods that frightened Catherine with their beauty." With a different cover, you could sell the book as a bodice-ripper, it's so over-heated and over-wrought. Everything is overlaid with sex and longing. Though whether sex is pleasure or torture is rarely clear.

 

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Though Goolrick doesn't give us many lovable characters or couples who form lasting bonds, he beautifully describes love and marriage, even as characters reject it:

"She had agreed to marry him without realizing that marriage brought a kind of simple pleasure, a pleasure in the continued company of another human being, the act of caring, of carrying with you the thought of someone else." 

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL  SOCIETY

"A Reliable Wife" is an almost perfect book. My only real criticism is from a Wisconsin gardener's viewpoint. The house Catherine comes to has a conservatory and a ruined secret garden. She begins to be interested in horticulture, and thus, there are numerous very specific references to flowers and plants. While this element of gardening and rebirth is important to the story, I found the specificity disruptive since no other elements were described in such detail. 

Frankly, I stopped dead in my tracks at least three or four times, and pulled reference books off the shelf to see if the plants mentioned — like Japanese painted fern — were really in cultivation in the U.S. in 1907. I did not find any information to the contrary but I've put down enough novels when the gardening part of the story was wrong, that I think I am overly sensitive on the subject.

 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

THE PHOTOS: These images are part of a collection of over 6,000 glass plate negatives created by Charles J. Van Schaick. Van Schaick learned the art of photography after moving to Jackson County, Wisconsin. In 1885, he opened a studio in Black River Falls, Wisconsin and served as the town photographer for over 50 years. His work includes both studio portraits and richly varied and intimate snapshots of small-town, Wisconsin life. A portion of his photographic work is represented in Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy. You can view some of those images on line at the Wisconsin Historical Society's flickr site.

People in the above photos are unidentified except for the studio portrait of deceased twin infants in coffins (directly above). They are Robert and Janet Fitzpatrick, born July 5, 1885, and died April 20, 1886, children of Robert and Martha Fitzpatrick.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: While trying to learn if Goolrick was familiar with "Wisconsin Death Trip," I discovered he had written a memoir before the novel. It was on the shelf at my local library, so I grabbed it to take on a garden tour bus trip. I sat there absolutely engrossed in the memoir, "The End of the World As We Know It: Scenes from a Life." I raced through its 213 pages during the hours we were on the bus, finishing it shortly before we arrived at our hotel. 

Though "The End of the World" was laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, most of it was unutterably sad. Reading in the midst of gorgeous heartland farms and gardens — where I could take periodic breaks to absorb the life and beauty around me — may have been the only way I'd have made it through this book. Alcoholism is a prevalent force in the life of Goolrick and his family, and there were deeply disturbing scenes of attempted suicides. 

But I am glad that I managed to read those difficult parts, enabling me to understand Goolrick's story. It's a book that reminded me again how lucky I've been in my parents, my happy childhood, my whole life. A book like "The End of the World" paints a painful picture of what can happen when parents fail their children.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,

Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?

William King, "The Art of Cookery" (1708)

I added my name to the waiting list for "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" at #72. By the time it came in at the Sequoya Branch Library, I no longer remembered where I'd heard about the book or why I ordered it on-line from the regional library system. Luckily, I decided I must have had a good reason and, thus, I should just dig in and get reading.

"Sweetness" is a quirky, charming and slightly macabre first novel by Alan Bradley, featuring amateur sleuth, Flavia de Luce. Don't let the fact that Flavia is only eleven years old keep you away; she is a fully realized character in a book full of them. The book could be set in the 1890s or the 1920s; in fact, it's the 1950s. But it feels like the 1930s and I mentally kept picturing Flavia as drawn by the late Edward Gorey; it's that kind of a book. 

"Sweetness" reminded me of Kate Summerscale's "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," in that it features a house that is as unique as its odd inhabitants. There's also masses of obscure information about stamp collecting as well as philately, the study of stamps; also lots of 19th century science, chemistry in particular; along with plenty of unfamiliar words, like prestidigitation. In a book that casually mentions Capability Brown, Darwin and Thomas Jefferson, plenty of secondary learning by the reader occurs along with unraveling the mystery.

Our heroine, Flavia, is saved from loneliness and boredom with the discovery of an ancestor's chemistry library and laboratory. She becomes a student of the subject, rejoicing in her "newfound knowledge of what could be extracted so easily from nature. I was a student of poison," Flavia declares. Though she is not the poisoner in this murder mystery, she uses her scientific knowledge to repay her sisters for their sibling torments. Nothing fatal, but all three girls get quite nasty at times. 

The 1840 Penny Black stamp with red Maltese Cross cancellation.

All of that however, is merely a subtext to the main story which revolves around stolen stamps. They're historic, highly valuable and definitely worth committing murder to obtain. The problem is that it looks like Flavia's reclusive, stamp-collecting father, Colonel de Luce, is the murderer. I've personally always appreciated stamps from an artist's perspective, but Bradley offers an absolutely loving description of stamp collecting. The famed "Penny Black" British stamp is at the heart of the story — albeit, with a lot of poetic license. This is a fictional story after all.

Flavia is a child who is wise and observant beyond her years. She's surrounded by death, decay and — as in Jacqueline Winspear's  Maisie Dobbs' mysteries — damaged veterans of war. 

"Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life. Even I knew that."

"The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" is an enthralling mystery. The kind you can't put down and race through in a day and a night, unable to stop, unhappy to reach the end. Bradley plans to write more Flavia mysteries. Whether he can continue to create such deep, dark and delightful tales is uncertain; but I'm hoping the answer is yes.

PHOTO SOURCE UNKNOWN

The Penny Black stamp is so widely known, inside and outside of stamp-collecting circles, that a number of "black" flowers have been named in its honor. Nemophila menziesii 'Penny Black' (above) is an annual that can be grown from seed.

Yellow speaks

I find color — in the house or in the garden — an endlessly fascinating subject. Whenever there's a new book on the subject at my local library, I bring it home. Usually I pay more attention to the pictures than the text, but sometimes the writer captures a color perfectly in words,too. 

In the book, "Color At Home," authors Meg and Steven Roberts call the chapter on yellow, "Spring's sweet shout." It's a charming phrase that aptly describes what's happening in my garden this week. Here are a few early yellows that demand to be heard.

Primroses (top), Epimedium, and Marsh marigold.

The Willoughbys

"The Wolves of Willoughby Chase" came out in 1962 and I would have been about the right age to read it. But I thought I was too grown-up. I had to wait 40 years to be the right age again! 

Author Joan Aiken piles it on: An ancestral home, a gruesome governess, wicked wolves, two resourceful little cousins and their friend, Simon, the goose-boy. How the children deal with the dastardly Miss Slighcarp is a charming and engrossing tale; a classic of children's literature with what I've always considered an absolutley perfect title. 

So how could I not read "The Willoughbys," Lois Lowry's take on the genre of tragic 19th century stories of childhood — and their contemporary counterparts like "WIlloughby Chase." I admit I'd never heard of "The Willoughbys" until I saw it on Top Ten list of books compiled by Jane Pearlmutter, Associate Director of the School of Library & Information Studies at UW-Madison. A friend sent me Pearlmutter's year-end roundup, along with her own. "The Willoughbys" is the first of three of Pearlmutter's favorites that I've ordered from the public library, where I also found "Willoughby Chase."

"The Willoughbys" is smart, sophisticated and silly. The book is a perfect parody, starting with the cover: black, white and a dash of red — though less dark and dangerous than the same combination on the cover of "Willoughby Chase." The red door of the house depicted is the actual color of the book's cover, visible through a cutout in the paper dustjacket. Along with the title and author, the cover says the book is "A Novel Nefariously Written & Ignominiously Illustrated by The Author." That should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Lowry follows the story of the four Willoughby children who want to be orphans like the children in all the books they read. Lucky for them, their parents have come up with the same idea. Enter the nanny, a mysterious child left on the doorstep, a wealthy candy maker, lost heirs — everything you could want and then some. Lowry's text is full of puns and word games that had me laughing out loud. 

The book includes a deviantly delightful glossary as well as a bibliography of "Books of the past that are heavy on piteous but appealing orphans, ill-tempered and stingy relatives, magnanimous benefactors, and transformations wrought by winsome children." Huck Finn, Heidi, the Bobbsey Twins and Mary Poppins are among the books included.

It's guaranteed to make you forget your troubles — if only for an evening.

A book a week

Last winter, just after I discovered Persephone Books, I discovered book bloggers. Or rather, a book blogger discovered me. I suppose it was inevitable given the fact that we live in the same town and are both fans of the U.K. publishing house, Persephone.

Becky aka A Book A Week sent me a note about a newspaper column I wrote about Persephone and I've been reading about what Becky's reading ever since. Sometimes I've read the title she's covering; other times I've been inspired by an unknown title.

But mostly I've been inspired to follow Becky's lead and read a book a week, something she's been doing for 25 years! It helped when I realized that — though I haven't managed to make it through 52 books in 2008 — some weeks I easily make it through a book or three. The problem is that a number of weeks may pass before I pick up another, let alone finish it. Or I read the same one twice — which isn't fair to count as two books (is it Becky?).

Persephone, founded in 1999 by feminist historian and biographer Nicola Beauman, publishes books, mainly by women, that are reprints of "neglected" novels, diaries, short stories, cookbooks and poetry from the early to mid-20th century.

My resolution for 2009 is to try to follow Becky's lead and read a book a week. In the meantime, I'm following in the footsteps of Stuck in a Book and Other Rooms with this end-of-year-roundup:

HOW MANY BOOKS READ IN 2008: 44 (and three in progress. I'm not counting cookbooks, gardening or design and decor since I tend to dip into them on an ongoing basis rather than "finish" them).

FICTION/NON-FICTION RATIO: 29/15 The non-fiction was mostly memoir and biography,

MALE/FEMALE AUTHORS: 13/31. This was not intentional, merely inevitable, given how many Persephone titles I read this year as well as an interest in women's history.

FAVORITE BOOK READ: I did mention a few favorites earlier but I read Frances Hodgson Burnett's marvelous  "The Shuttle" (Persephone) 2+ times since I ordered it early in 2008. An era that intrigues me, plus country houses and FHB's first ideas about gardens all coming together in a novel with an intelligent heroine who has money and power and wields both well.

LEAST FAVORITE: Anything I did not finish so it did not make it onto my final (unpublished) list. There are a number of contenders but I'll go with "The Zookeeper's Wife." Widely acclaimed but not by me — I consider it overwritten to the point of distraction.

OLDEST BOOK READ: Not a year for really old books for me; lots of early 20th century with "The Making of a Marchioness" taking the lead at 1901. 

NEWEST: Lots of 2008 titles like poet Donald Hall's memoir, "Unpacking the Boxes."

LONGEST BOOK TITLE: "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization" by Nicholson Baker.

SHORTEST TITLE: Winner by one letter, "Reflex," by Dick Francis — a re-read for the millionth time.

HOW MANY RE-READS: 7 (Dick Francis, a Spenser myster, "The Snow Goose" for Christmas, two F.H. Burnett, "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict" by Laurie Viera Rigler (a new title this year and a hoot), and Georgette Heyer's "The Talisman Ring." 

MOST BOOKS READ BY ONE AUTHOR THIS YEAR: Frances Hodgson Burnett, five: "The Head of the House of Coombe," "Robin," "The Shuttle" (see above), "The Making of a Marchioness" (also above) and a new edition of "The Secret Garden" with enchanting illustrations by Inga Moore. Three each by Barbara Cleverly (mysteries) and Jeffrey Farnol (early 20th century novels — delightfully dated).

ANY IN TRANSLATION: None to my knowledge.

AND HOW MANY OF THIS YEAR'S BOOKS WERE FROM THE LIBRARY: 18. 

One of the pleasures of Persephone Books is that the endpapers are reproductions of fabric from the era when the title was originally published. Each book also comes with a bookmark of the same design (four examples above).

As for 2009, I'm not off to a very good start. I've barely picked up a book in the last two days. But I have spent some time thinking about what to read in '09. 

Should I have a plan? Follow a topic? Invest in an author? Be led by a blogger? I've thought about only reading books that are already sitting on my shelves but are still unread. I'm sure I've got a book a week there. And I wouldn't have to worry about library due dates or fines. 

But given the stories about troubled bookstores, I feel a degree of guilt if I'm not out there buying books. Still, I know I'll be horrified when I see what I've spent on books in 2008 — as if it will be any consolation to publishers. 

Have you got a reading plan for 2009?  Does it matter — or is just reading enough?

Caught by Mr. Whicher

I've been waiting since summer for my name to reach the top of the library hold list for "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective," but it finally happened.  

I picked up my copy of the book and could not put it down; all that waiting and I devoured it in a weekend. So there's no question but I will add my voice to the chorus of praise (and a hefty prize) for author Kate Summerscale. For my tastes, "Mr. Whicher" combines the best of both worlds: densely documented non-fiction and a 19th century country house murder.

But in this case, it's a real murder and we follow the trail of the most famous member of a new law-enforcement entity: the detective. The story centers on the abduction and murder of the three-year-old son of a supposedly respectable middle-class couple. The child was stabbed, his throat was cut and he was then stuffed down the privy. The house was locked, everyone was at home asleep and it seems clear that a member of the immediate household must have committed the crime. 

And what a delicious household: the governess who married the master after the first wife went insane and died, the children of the first and second marriages competing for attention and affection, and the usual list of indoor and outdoor staff required to take care of a country estate. If there is anything that may deter a reader, it's the daunting list of all these characters printed on the first pages.

What makes the book so fascinating is that both the sensational crime and the famed Detective Inspector Whicher (one of the original eight Scotland Yard detectives) become the model for crime novels and crime solvers, beginning with Wilkie Collins and "The Moonstone." We see the public mania for amateur sleuthing take hold; widespread fascination with the charismatic detective, from Dickens on down; the pandering and speculation by much of the press about the crime. It all reads like something that happened last week. 

That modernity is one of the things that is so compelling about the book. That and the detail that Summerscale unearths about the murder, the people and the period. It is a tour de force accomplisment with Summerscale writing a page-turning crime novel while she dissects the history of the page-turning crime novel. To pull it off, she includes an almost overwhelming amount of detail which will either fascinate you or bore you. I was hooked, and so I even read most of the notes and sources at the end of the book.  

D.I. Whicher had a good idea about who committed the crime but public opinion turned on him before he brought the investigation to a satisfactory conclusion. Citizens didn't like the idea of someone of a different (meaning lower) class invading the sanctity of their homes and holding them accountable; asking personal questions that were considered prying, if not outright prurient.

Summerscale takes the tale to its conclusion, but it is the unfolding history — not the identity of the murderer — that held me spellbound.

Here are a few of my favorite tidbits of information from "Mr. Whicher":

The modern word "clue" stems from "clew," a ball of thread or yarn, which had come to mean "that which points the way" because Theseus used a ball of yarn to find his way out of the Minotaur's Labyrinth.

1862: word "clueless' first used.

Summerscale lists a number of nicknames as well as derogatory terms for the police, noting that "pigs" has been a term of abuse since the sixteen century.

An early Christmas gift

The numbers are starting to get scary: Nervous employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years. Not great holiday news. I got my bad news last spring so I'm used to sitting here blogging, job-hunting on-line and reading books the rest of the time — especially since it's now too cold to garden. 

The last time I was unemployed, I went right out and bought Lee Bailey's "Country Weekends," which had just been published. That's my standard response to the unemployment blues: buy fantasy books. So this summer and fall I got lots of pricey tomes like Carolyne Roehm's "A Passion for Blue & White." You can just imagine the hit my budget took!

Still, I believe in buying books because I love to read and I want publishers and bookstores to survive. And books like Roehm's are the kind I will keep forever and continue to pull off the shelf again and again. They're among the kind of books I recommend for holiday giving if your budget is still healthy.

But novels and mysteries and books that I'm not sure if I will like — those just got crossed off my list. Not my reading list; just my buying list. And that's because I got my Christmas present a month early: a beautiful new library! No, not in my house; I mean the neighborhood branch of the public library. We've been watching its construction for months and it quietly opened just before Thanksgiving. 

The gorgeous new Sequoya Branch Library is not only part of our city's library system, but also the larger South Central (Wisconsin) Library System: a cooperative network of 52 libraries in 7 counties with a shared on-line catalog and reciprocal borrowing privileges. 

I am the woman who has an antique library card catalog in her living room with a drawer full of hand-written index cards for each of my plants. So you can imagine when the library switched to an on-line catalog I was not a happy reader ... until I realized I could quickly check whether the just-released finalists for the National Books Awards were in the library or whether they had an obscure film I'd just read about. And I could request those items electronically — immediately — and have them sent to the branch library of my choice for pickup. Suddenly, it was not a brave new world I had entered but heaven. 

FLICKR PHOTO/Used without permission

One of the librarians re-shelves books at the new library down the street from the old location.

The other day I really wanted to buy a bunch of books from the list of wonderful reprints offered by The New York Review of Books (who had just sent me a holiday sale e-mail). Instead I checked on the 6 titles I was interested in and found 5 in the library's system. So I will read them courtesy of my library; and if they're really good then I'll consider a purchase.

But in these dark days, our new library — actually any library old or new — is a beacon. It offers a whole world for free. And it keeps getting better: now our library will let you know via email when your books have come in or are almost due. You can check them out yourself (electronically, of course) after picking them up yourself from the hold shelf.

You can subscribe to newletters and book lists (or just go on-line to find and read them) and you can read librarians' reviews of books: MADreads. That's how I discovered Valerie Martin's "Property" (thanks to Lisa at the Central Library) and Ellen Shanman's "Everything Nice" (thanks to Jane J. also downtown).

One last present to local readers: starting January 11, Sequoya will be open Sunday afternoons from 1 to 5 p.m. — until the end of April when the Farmers' Market and growing season start again. I'm not really boasting about our library system; let's call it boosting — and I hope you will do the same with your own library! 

And in these tight economic times, you know someone will be looking to curtail library budgets as non-essential. They've never been more important; so perhaps we should all think about giving our libraries a little financial aid as our early Christmas gift to them.

PHOTO BY CHUCK ROTH/Used without permission

The Tokay Boulevard entrance to the new Sequoya Branch Library. The library is named in honor of Sequoya, the American Indian Cherokee scholar and leader who created a written Cherokee language. There are condos on the upper floors; my dream would be to live upstairs and be able to check out library books at midnight in my jammies.

MADISON MEMO: The formal opening ceremony/ribbon cutting/celebration at Sequoya Branch Library is Monday, Dec. 8 from 4:30-6:00 p.m. 

4340 Tokay Boulevard / Madison WI 53711 / 608.266.6385