It was a glorious November day, stark and long-shadowed as only South Georgia can make it. The road we traversed was a familiar one—as familiar as the drive to my own home—and every field and house and stand of pines was a familiar friend. Even the red dirt roads veering off to the left and…
After an insanely busy week that crash landed in illness, the post I’d been weaving in my head never actually made it to the page. As my mother is always faithful to remind me, “life is what happens when you had other plans”. Nevertheless, I thought I’d just pop in and say Hello! and a…
A re-post from a year ago…simply because I’m feeling so nostalgic. And so wistful over the thought of absent friends that I can’t help it… It is the burnished season. At last. The sheep and goats amble across the pasture these late afternoons in a wash of amber and the trees around the house are…
You don’t have to spend much time around here to know that I am a Romantic of the old order. I love the tenderness of a well-turned phrase, the high sensibility of a love letter. My heart plunges and rises and plunges again with the pathos of a Chopin nocturne and I am always the…
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. ~George Eliot Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves…
It’s easy to forget—or perhaps never fully realize in the first place—just what a treasure we hold in our hands in the form of a book. In times not too far past, books were solely the possession of the wealthy. As recently as the publication dates of many of my favorite nineteenth century novels, books…
At the gentle (and brilliant) suggestion of a reader, I have decided to act upon a notion I had back in the summer, before I even opened the Bookshop at Lanier’s Books, namely, a series of proper introductions to the authors and titles you will find on my shelves. My books are selected with great…
What a perilous thing is revisiting. In retracing the steps of former joys, one always runs the risk of replacement. There is always the danger of finding things not quite so magical as memory has painted them. Be it the effect of time or merely the angle of the sun on a given day and…
A year ago I was waking up in England. I was going to sleep at night to the sound of the sea pounding on a Cornish shore and opening my eyes in the morning to the carol of robins and the cry of gulls outside the open casement. Lying amid downy pillows, drowsily bewitched by…
I felt like the villain in a Gothic novel. I had stormed the castle gates, hooded and veiled, and thrown the guards into confusion with a diversion of smoke. Right to the very heart of the fortress I plied, past those who fain would shield their queen to the death, into the sacred quarters of…
My sister and I have always held that this is the perfect time of year to be reading a Lucy Maud Montgomery book. No matter how many times they’ve been read and re-read—the condition of my beloved paperbacks is quite appalling!—there is just something about September that seems to evoke a mood sufficiently wistful to…
The ‘chic vintage affair’ with which I envisioned conducting the drawing just wouldn’t cut it for the outpouring of entries that came in, so I had to resort to a slightly more no-nonsense chapeau in straw and black velvet. (But it is rather more Anne-ish than a feathered and frilled number, wouldn’t you agree?) I…
One month ago I drafted a post introducing the Bookshop at Lanier’s Books and I pushed ‘Publish’ with a pounding heart. Four weeks later, we hit the 100-mark with books sold and marked the first small anniversary of a dream-come-true. “I can’t believe I’ve done this one hundred times,” I told Philip as he watched…
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. The Henry David gem had been buzzing at my mind all day, and all day I had been tenaciously smiling it down. I had smiled it down when I cut out one of the skirt pieces upside down, and when I had to trot back to the store…
George Macdonald was the grandfather of us all. ~Madeleine L’Engle Ten pages into George MacDonald’s Lilith I was thoroughly entranced—there’s nothing like a memory-haunted library and a mysterious visitant and secret doors to get this girl to sit up and take notice. Twenty pages in I was right royally flummoxed. I found myself floundering and…
Disturb us, Lord, when We are too pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess We have lost our thirst For the waters of life; Having…
Quite candidly, I didn’t get the big idea. A slim volume with an address for a title. (Albeit a London, address, lending a smidge of credibility.) Nondescript, by an American lady I had never heard of. And yet, Mrs. Downs couldn’t keep it in the store. She was constantly tracking down first editions for people…
There is no such thing as art. There are only artists. Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art I had that driven home this past weekend at The Rabbit Room’s first-ever gathering in the flesh, saw it living and breathing, laughing and even getting choked up at times. Felt its electricity tingling in my veins and…
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