Creating a Home Library - A Labor of Love by Eileen O'Finlan

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I recently took on a labor of love in my home - turning an unused room into a library. "Labor of love" is definitely the right term. There is a tremendous amount of both involved. 

After having the furniture that was in the room removed, I had to do battle with a slew of killer dust bunnies. I was able to banish them, but they took their revenge by inducing a lot of non-stop sneezing.

Next came removing all the books from all five bookcases in my living room as well as the books on the built-in shelves on either side of the fireplace and carrying them, one bag at a time, to the soon-to-be library. Following that, I carried each bookcase into the room. With so many books taking up the floor space it wasn't easy getting the bookcases into the room. I can't imagine what I'll do in the coming days when I bring in the books from five more bookcases coming from other rooms. I could load the books into the bookcases already there, but I really want to organize them first.

                                  

I've had to rethink my plans more than once. I originally wanted to put my antique secretary desk and my papasan chair in the library, but now I realize that even though I might be able to squeeze them in, they will make the room very overcrowded. Instead of the papasan, I moved in my bentwood rocker. I'll wait on the secretary and see how much room is available when I'm finished. (With the removal of the bookcases from the living room, there is now enough space in there for the papasan so all good!) I'm also planning to put the round rock maple table in the center of the room as a place to spread out my books, notes, and documents for my novel research.

That should give you an idea of the "labor" part. Now for the "love."

Having a home library has always been one of my heart's desires. Seriously, I could sit and gaze as shelves of books in the same way one gazes dreamily at a lover. (Add a cat into the picture and I'm over the moon!) So, the fact that this is becoming a reality has me in raptures. I can just picture myself gently rocking in my rocking chair reading a book or sitting at the table diligently researching my next novel. I nearly swoon thinking about it.

Labor of love? You bet! Lugging books, bookcases and other assorted furniture is a small price to pay for what it will be in the end.

Libraries at Christmas

 

Find my BWL page here!

Here in Bellows Falls, Vermont, we're getting ready for our annual Holiday Party, the first one in a couple of years. We are so excited. Some local musicians are going to come and play old-time music. My fellow Friend of the Library Leslie and I will be leading a Christmas music sing along. We'll have treats and a pick your own present raffle. 

Lots of great choices!

My son-in-law Teddy make cute tags for the raffle gifts

My donation is two of my BWL YA novels and a bead ornament made by a local Abenaki craftsperson.

Do you have a favorite library story?

I grew up in a house without books, so the library was where the stories lived. I couldn't wait to get my library card. To achieve this passport to wonder, I had to be able to write my full name. I had a long last name, and like many young children, I was slightly dyslectic. I practiced and practiced, but as the librarian watched, I had a crisis in confidence over which direction the "b" in Charbonneau went. I hesitated. This prim, kind lady gave me a hand signal that opened up my world! Big thanks to her.

Happy Season of Light from Patience and Fortitude welcming all to the NYC Public Library!

Show Your Library Some Love by Eileen O'Finlan

 

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I love libraries! I'll bet if you're reading this post, you love libraries, too. Libraries are like portals to a multitude of other worlds. Entering a library offers nearly limitless access to anywhere you want to go or anything you want to learn. You can even travel to other time periods, planets, alternate universes, and more. Of course, the many books in the library are the vehicles that will take you there. 

But there is more to libaries than books. Libraries connect us with technology, media, programs. They also connect us with one another, offer a community, invite us to events. Libraries are just plain awesome!

We are in the midst of National Library Week. This year's theme is "Connect With Your Library." Today, specifically, is Take Action for Libraries Day. By clicking on this link you can access the American Library Association's information on how you can tell Congress to fund libraries.

So, show your library some love today and let those hard-working librarians know how much they are appreciated!

What I Miss About Libraries

 

 

Ah! The feeling of a hardbound book in my hands! The rows upon rows of texts, stacked five high! The quiet, studious atmosphere!

If you’re like me, you are surely missing your local library. With the pandemic, my library has been closed for months. It seems like an eternity. In these days of Zoom meetings and digital readers, here are a few things I miss about libraries:

 1)      Librarians: Yes, Google helps me track down reference materials, but search engines are only as smart as I. Many an instance, librarians have taken my searches in directions I didn’t imagine and found surprising answers to my questions. And I can have a conversation with a librarian; the computer remains mute.

2)      A place to concentrate: I write at home. But, like most writers, I need to get out regularly for the creative juices to flow. At home, distractions abound: the television, family members and even the dog. At the library, it is just me and my thoughts, and ideas flow so much more easily.

3)      Conversations. This might contradict the previous point, but one of the things I enjoy about libraries are the random conversations with interesting persons. Yes, they can be distractions if overdone, but are refreshing and energizing if done intelligently.

         4)      Cozy corners and enchanting places: This is especially true with old libraries, with their long wooden tables and reading chairs hidden in unexpected places. These places transport me into a mood where, unsurprisingly, I become easily absorbed in my reading.

        5)      Heading home with a stack of books: Somehow, there is a special feeling of contentment and fulfilment in spending a couple of hours in the library, wandering through the stacks, exploring dozens of texts, choosing the appropriate ones, checking them out and planning which one to read first.

             Hopefully these dreadful pandemic restrictions will end soon, and we can all get back to our normal lives. And with any luck, my local library will open soon!

 

            Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation" a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

How Dare They Teach Women to Read by Diane Scott Lewis

Last month was Women's History month (we only get one month?)

Women have been fighting for equal treatment for centuries. And education, learning to read, was one of their desires.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, many women, especially the poor, could not read. It was viewed as a waste of time to teach them when they were to be child-bearers and house keepers. Women were taught to be useful, sewing, cooking, etc.
The richer girls were taught to embroider to beautify their husband's home.
Men handled the complicated contracts, leases, government business. Reading as a leisure activity was unheard of, even for men.

Between the 1500’s and the mid-eighteenth century, male literacy grew from ten to sixty per cent. Women, with less opportunity, lagged behind, ranging from one to forty percent, but still an improvement. Female literacy grew the fastest in London, probably with the rise of the merchant class.

As literacy grew so did the desire for books. A spurt in publishing started in the late seventeenth century.

Books had been rare, usually of a religious bent. Cookery books were found in many households. Sermons and poetry were the most widely published literary forms. History books were national or Eurocentric.

In the eighteenth century a new phenomenon, the populace wanted to read for pleasure.

Books became widely available from lending libraries, booksellers, and peddlers: abbreviated versions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, or Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.

Periodicals, such as the Gentleman’s Magazine, advertised what new novels were available to order and purchase from the booksellers.

The large circulating libraries offered places where patrons could browse, gossip, flirt, or actually read a book. Novels and romances were the most checked-out. History remained popular.

Library at Margate

The fee of three shillings a quarter kept out the poorer people, but libraries were still a bargain because books weren’t cheap.

Unfortunately, libraries earned the reputation as places full of fictional pap for rich ladies with nothing better to do. Men remained the majority subscribers, visiting to read or discuss religious and political controversy.

Church libraries offered books to the poorer, though not the variety.

Coffee houses maintained collections of books, to be read on the premises. Any man, merchant or laborer, could wander in, order punch, and read a newspaper—a sign of English liberty.

Even the illiterate were encouraged to buy books so their more literate friends could read to them.

In 1650 few country houses had a room set aside for books and reading, while in the late eighteenth century a house without a library was unthinkable.

With this wider reading public, more women authors and romantic writers emerged, such as Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffe. Women read critically to lift the mind from sensation to intellect as well as men.

Fanny Burney

Everyone profited from increased literacy, education and the availability of the written word. Why teach women to read? Because, as earlier thought, their minds are not feebler than men's

Source: The Pleasures of the Imagination, by John Brewer, 1997

For a heroine who does far more than read, she decodes ancient Greek during the American Revolution, check out my historical novel, Her Vanquished Land.

Purchase Her Vanquished Land and my other novels at BWL

For more info on me and my books, check out my website: Dianescottlewis

Diane Scott Lewis lives in Western Pennsylvania with her husband and one naughty puppy.

Lucy Maud Montgomery and Prince Edward Island by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan

 
I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.
       I have decided to write about the scenery, attractions, and history of my country. This post is about Lucy Maud Montgomery.

The Confederation Bridge connects Borden-Carlton, Prince Edward Island, with the rest of Canada at Cape Jourimain, New Brunswick. It is the longest bridge in the world that crosses ice-covered water and was completed in 1997 at a cost of $840 million.

 

 

 

     We paid our toll and drove the bridge over the 12.9 kilometre wide Northumberland Strait. We headed to Green Gables in Cavendish in the Prince Edward Island National Park. One of the most famous writers in the world was from Prince Edward Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874 in New London, PEI. Her ancestors came from Scotland in the 1770s and her grandfathers were members of the provincial legislature for years. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Lucy was 2 and Lucy spent a much of her childhood with her maternal grandparents on the Macneill homestead in Cavendish. Her father moved west in 1887 and remarried. Lucy joined him but felt out of place and soon returned to PEI and her grandparents. She also spent time with her extended family on her mother’s side and her paternal grandfather.
     However, her grandparents weren’t very affectionate and Lucy felt lonely and isolated. This led her to reading an abundant number of books and using her imagination to write her own stories. She started with poetry and journals when she was nine years old and had her first poem, On Cape Le Force, published in the Charlottetown Patriot in November 1890. She started writing short stories in her mid-teens. She first published them in local newspapers then sold them to magazines throughout Canada and the United States.
     Lucy studied to be a teacher and began teaching in a village school in the late 1890s. She was also writing and selling her works so that when her grandfather died in 1898, she was able to leave her teaching position and move in with her grandmother. Between then and 1911 she wrote and sold poems and stories and also worked in the post office on her grandmother’s homestead.
    Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published in 1908 and was an instant bestseller. She got her idea from other novels written by women like Little Women and from a story she read about a couple who had arranged to adopt a boy but were sent a girl. The book sold more than 19,000 copies in the first five months and was reprinted ten times in the first year. It is still in print after more than a century. Lucy wrote two sequels, Anne of Green Gables: Anne of Avonlea (1909) and Anne of the Island (1915) plus five more Anne books over her lifetime. She had a total of twenty books, over five hundred short stories, and one book of poetry published before she died in 1942.
     In her private life,  Lucy had many suitors over the years and became secretly engaged to a distant cousin named Edwin Simpson in 1897. This ended with she began a romance with a farmer named Hermann Leard. Leard died in 1899 from influenza and Lucy threw herself into her writing. Lucy married a minister, Ewen Macdonald, after her grandmother died in 1911 and they moved to Ontario where Ewen had a parish. They had two sons, Chester and Stuart, and a third one who was stillborn. They moved to another village in 1926 and then, after Ewen was admitted to a sanatorium in 1934 and he resigned his parish, they moved to Toronto in 1935. Ewen died in 1943.
     The Green Gables House has been restored to match the descriptions in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. I toured through the historic site, seeing the exhibits in the Green Gables house and strolling the Haunted Woods and Balsam Hollow trails that were mentioned in her books.

     Prince Edward Island also boasts have Canada’s smallest library. It is one room with shelves of books along the walls and a table and chairs in the centre.