Fore-edge, Folding and Other Uses for Old Books by Karla Stover

Yes, there is a town in Wales devoted to second hand books; it's Hay-on-Wye. But I just checked and the number of book stores is starting to decline. What to do with all the unloved books?   . 

One idea is to turn them into art. There are "How to" tutorials all over YouTube, but for something completely unique there is Fore-edge painting which is a scene painted on the edges of the pages of a book. Fore-edge has two options:  paintings on the edges of the pages and which can only be seen when the pages are fanned. The painting should be invisible when the book is closed; or painting is on the closed edge itself and thus should not be fanned. The following comes from Wikipedia:

"In order to view the painting, the leaves of the book must be fanned, exposing the edges of the pages and thereby the painting. Another basic difference is that a painting on the closed edge is painted directly on the surface of the book edge (the fore-edge being the opposite of the spine side). For the fanned painting the watercolor is applied to the top or bottom margin (recto or verso) of the page/leaf and not to the actual "fore"-edge itself."

The art form has been around for a long time but there is one amusing story about its use. Among Charles II of England's many "lady friends" was a duchess, who often borrowed his books, sometimes forgetting to return them.(I'm guessing it was Barbara Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland). To remedy the situation, the king "commissioned the court painter, Sir Peter Lely and the court bookbinder, Samuel Mearne, to devise a secret method in which his books could be identified. Between the two they came up with something unique. It went into effect a few weeks later when the king was visiting the duchess and spotted a familiar looking book on a shelf. "Taking it down he said, “I’ll just take my book along with me.” “But sire,” the lady protested, “that book is mine.” “Oh?" The king raised his brows. Then, with a sly smile, he fanned out the book and revealed what had been painted on the inner edges--the royal coat of arms. The gilding on the outer edges had completely hidden the identification. Acknowledging that Charles had outwitted her, the duchess sank in a deep curtsy before her king." (Since most of the king's lady friends were also his mistresses, she probably did more than that.)

I once wrote a short story where my protagonist, Miss Agnes Grey, solved the mystery with a clue on a book which had been painted using the technique. I may have tried to get "Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine" to accept the story but I forget. It currently lies fallow on a thumb-drive somewhere,

I've attempted to attach a picture courtesy of Pinterest but they don't always transfer. If not, Google Fore-edge and look at all the samples on "images."

Auctions and Antiques

https://books2read.com/Hold-On-To-The-Past

Every September I like to remember the Steamboat Arabia, which sank in the Missouri River near Kansas City in September of 1856. Because the river changed course over the next hundred or more years, it was discovered in a cornfield in 1988, and a wonderful museum was opened for the preserved artifacts in 1991. I have visited the museum every time I am in Kansas City, and as I walked through the exhibits my imagination soared. What was life like back in that time? This was the premise for "Hold On To the Past", a romantic time travel I wrote about being on board the Steamboat Arabia during its last fateful voyage.

Of course, the cargo on board now falls under the definition of antiques, which got me thinking about other ways we salvage the past through auctions and antique malls.

Years ago, I went to an auction with my sister. I have to preface this by saying I'm afraid of going to auctions. You see, I talk with my hands (not sign language; just gesturing) and waving your hands around at an auction can get you in trouble. Plus I never understand exactly what the auctioneer is saying and worry that if I bid and think it's for 50 cents, it might actually be for 50 dollars. So while I go, it is with hands tucked under my arms or in pockets, and I have my sister bid for me.

The best auctions are estate auctions, as I am always on the lookout for old things. I don’t collect antique furniture, china or Depression glass. I hunt for diaries, journals, old ledgers –written glimpses into the past. At this particular auction, I found baggies of old letters, written by a young man stationed in Europe during WWI. In addition, there was a small book with rules for enlisted men upon discharge. THIS is the world of antiques that interests me.

The downside was that I only had letters he had sent home to his family. I didn’t have the letters from Iowa that were sent to him. Even so, I came to know this man and some of his family. For one example, he did not particularly like the young man his sister was spending time with. His life, and who knows how many stories, lie within the words he penned over one hundred years ago.

At another auction the same sister bid on and won a quilt top. When she spread it out at home and we took a closer look, we found it had been hand stitched, not machine sewn. At that time quilting was my sister’s thing, not mine, but then she said “I wonder who made this quilt and why. I wonder where they lived and how they managed.”

As a writer, that was something I could get my teeth into. Her simple statements led me to write a story I called “The Christmas Quilt” about a quilt, made for a daughter having a child at Christmas, and how that quilt was handed down through the generations.

Auctions are good for the creative process in different ways. Studying the items for sale can give you a sense of life as it was played out for a family in a particular community. (Realizing that a rural community will possibly sell farm implements right along with the family dishware.) It can give you a feel for the value people placed on particular items.

And more than even the items up for auction, the participants at these festivities can provide you with a wealth of background and characterization. Everything from facial expressions to stances can give away a person’s interest in an item being auctioned. If you watch, you’ll soon discover who is a frequent participant and buyer; who knows who and who knew the deceased owner of what is being auctioned.  Even more important, if you’re the auctioneer (or a writer looking for inside information), see if you can discover a bidder’s “tell.”

I went to a cattle auction once with my dad and throughout the entire affair, the auctioneers and helpers kept pointing and saying “yep”, “yep” but I never saw anyone raise a hand or their bid number. I particularly studied my dad, who was in the market for calves, but he sat there with his arms crossed over his ample stomach and never said a word. When I whispered my question, he said simply, “watch.” And then I saw it – the slight lift of a finger; a simple wink; the touch of a hat brim. It was a small town weekly auction, and I daresay the participants knew each other as well as their “tells”, but it was a game everyone participated in.

Many times instead of an auction, the remains of a family estate find their way to antique stores. Antiques by definition are items 100 years old or more, and too often their stories are lost through time. People live through tough times and must sell family possessions to have money for food. The very last great-grandchild of a family rooted in the community for hundreds of years dies, leaving no one to inherit the curio cabinet or the jelly glasses much less to pass down the stories behind such items.

Almost every town has an antique store or perhaps a mall, where several vendors have booths. While I enjoy looking at various items, I am dismayed to see things that I had as a child are now in antique displays! According to definition, I am not yet an antique. I prefer to consider myself a collectible, or perhaps like a fine wine – I am vintage. 

Barb Baldwin

http://www.authorsden.com/barbarajbaldwin

https://bookswelove.net/baldwin-barbara/

 

Featured Author - Reed Stirling

Purchase links to details and purchase links for your favorite retailer by clicking this link.   https://bookswelove.net/stirling-reed/

Reed Stirling, my alter ego, lives in Cowichan Bay, BC, and writes when not painting landscapes (see below) travelling or

or taking coffee at The Drumroaster, a local café where physics and metaphysics clash daily. Before retiring and taking up writing novels as a past time, I taught English Literature. Joyce Carol Oates oversaw my M.A. thesis. Several talented students of mine have gone on to become successful award-winning writers.

My wife and I built a log home in the hills of southern Vancouver Island [view photo], and survived totally off the grid for twenty-five years during which time the rooms in that house filled up with books, thousands of student essays were graded, and innumerable cords of firewood were split.

Literary output — Shades Of Persephone, published in 2019, is a literary mystery set in Greece. Lighting The Lamp, a fictional memoir, was published in March 2020. A third novel is presently undergoing revision. Shorter work has appeared over the years in a variety of publications including Hackwriters Magazine, Dis(s)ent, The Danforth Review, Fickle Muses, The Fieldstone Review, Humanist Perspectives, and StepAway Magazine.

Intrigue is my primary interest, with romantic entanglement an integral part of the action. Allusions to mythology, art, literature, philosophy, and religion underpin plot development. Irony is pervasive. I sit down to write every day and try to leave the desk having achieved at least a workable page. Frequently what comes of my effort amounts to no more than a serviceable paragraph, a single sentence, or a metaphor that might work in a context yet to be imagined.

Favourite authors —

John Banville, Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemmingway, Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles

 from Shades of Persephone

 Magalee De Bellefeuille. A woman others dressed in dreams, photographed, painted, prayed to, lusted after, called whore and fell in love with. She’ll rip your heart out, man! An unwelcome caveat at that time, humbling then, humbling now. And yet, how easily with the winking of an eye or the pulling of a leg could she attribute to me the ego of a fool. I prefer to dwell on the adulation.

Manolis, blue smoke above his head: “I tell you what I think, Steven. You have made of Magalee an ikon, and desire only to pray.”

Damen Van Raamsdonk, the artist, sought salvation through Magalee, but only on canvas could he capture and hold his own perceptions of her. In his sanity, she was his muse; in his madness, she was his demon, a sluttish succubus slinking around on the dark edge of atavistic fantasy. I appreciated Damien's genius, understood his aesthetic needs, but was horrified by his instincts.

                With the words Die Magdalee, Trüger acknowledged a state of grace he could not attain. He objectified Magalee. He framed her in a caption. He was able then in a devious flip of logic to soil her elevated image, to smash it, to profane it. He called her whore: he attributed to this idol of his own imagining all manner of behaviour becoming to one he wanted to, but could not, get his hands on.

In unrequited fits, I had shared Trüger’s sentiments, and found his innuendo made Magalee all the more attractive. What I lacked in pure pagan apprehension, I made up for with a perverse pleasure in visualizing the supple thigh of beauty exposed to his shadowy lights. She therefore became darker, more alluring, and so even more unattainable. This inadvertent betrayal I would attempt to rectify, to sanctify rather, with poetic sentimentality…

Barefoot, all leg and supple thigh, Magalee slowly enters the stream, and with cupped hands curls out water over her head. She screams with delight. Cicadas cease chirring, only to break out immediately in heightened frenzy.

She is quickly soaked, her t-shirt but a veil, her raven hair glistening with silvery tongues, her body therefore like a statue carved out of white mountain water and defined as graphically as desire itself. And then, with a laugh that deceives as readily as the willing mind believes, she splashes me repeatedly with cool liquid light.

Forever Magalee! Mischievous nymph. Renoir girl, naked in the dappled light. In the seething of this moment, the water is a caress.

                “Take me,” I hear her say, but I know the words are my own, Pan proposed, long sublimated, still unvoiced. She becomes Medusa the Beautiful, mortal, but she who empowers stones with being, capable at any time of turning my thoughts into words. In the cup of her moulded hands, hands that have touched the matrix, hands as delicate as immortality, she offers me water to drink…

               

                Over Akrotiri, wisps of her image now streak the evening sky like lines of haiku.

Reviews (Amazon):

               

                Excellent read

               

                Compelling

               

                skilfully weaves elements of mythology, Shakespearean tragedy and historical allusion to create a novel that is both intriguing and satisfying

               

                wonderful, magical Crete in the early ‘80s charms and enhances the mystery

                excellent mystery for fans of Greek mythology

from Lighting the Lamp

The more I engage in this identity search, the more I labour in a chronological arrangement of factual recall, the more I grow aware of static thrumming behind the scenes that I evoke, a subjective electromagnetic radiation, so to say, informing the background of my narrative with a species of tension stretched between past events and my recollection of them. The spectrum thus engendered ranges from humorous self-effacement to guilty self-reproach.

But truthful accounting. What to make of it? Total fabrication, I fear, may result in any effort to animate memory when significant events from decades past hide among the vagaries of time like participants in a game of blindman’s bluff. Memories can fracture and fragment. Misremembering may deflate the import of a specific childhood event, a first confession where guilt now has an incomprehensible context, for instance, or a bee sting, or on your seventh birthday getting your eye blackened by the neighbourhood bully. Then again, misremembering can conflate two or more innocent enough disinclinations on the part of a fair-haired friend into a single blockbuster put-down where the adolescent’s broken heart lies not in halves but in millions of pieces. Putting into words today what happened years ago requires disciplined deliberation. A nuanced articulation is hardly the equivalent of an adrenalin rush. How does one examine with any kind of accuracy the scar tissue of past emotion?

What’s more, can one’s heart beat melodiously? Or nerves shatter? Does disappointment droop or sag? Anger boil more than clench its fists?

Semantic refinement can distract endlessly if veracity is really the object of the exercise. Recollections can roam chimera-like in distant locations where the light of today’s understanding is faint. Narrative truth is a complex matter even with the aid of varying perspectives. How to record in a convincing manner disturbing or contrarian points of view and not be accused of being a hateful bigot?

Okay, fine. I’m dealing with all that.

Memory: acts of the mind aligning imagination, exaggeration, and artifice. You grasp today what eluded you yesterday and call it truth, though in the process you certainly do fabricate, falsify, or lie absolutely…

As sunlight breaks out of the darkness above Mount Tzouhalem, I am reminded of mythical Orpheus emerging from the world of shades, lyre in hand, having ascended through Stygian tracks, where the past follows along at a distance and falls back into oblivion. And after the subterraneous gloom and the loss, the light, of course, the immense light. Orpheus reborn crossing the threshold, Orpheus on the rebound, striding along in contemporary dress and climbing the steps of a temple adorned with life-size friezes of voyage and discovery, and where Jason, his one-time captain, points to the horizon, while Medea looks on having dipped the proffered silver goblet into her Cauldron of Regeneration. Proceeding into the world of intimate connections and transient appearances, Orpheus contemplates, in the web of endless possibilities that his mind weaves, the meaning of finality. His exit is not pretty, but it is poetic, and it is memorable. The lyre he holds against his chest will contribute nightly to the music of the spheres.

Review (Amazon):

                Insightful & revealing

 From the wharves of BC’s Cowichan Bay to the Old Port of Montreal and back again, protagonist and narrator Terry Burke uncovers and records lost chapters in his personal history… Steeped in new-found but essential truth, he undergoes a form of rebirth allowing a more authentic self to emerge...

 Among myriad themes in this all-encompassing work, two in particular draw the informed reader deeper into the narrative: the Socratic declaration that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and the alarming justification of mythical Medea that “the woman scorned is the woman reborn.”