A reflection not a resolution...
Today, I was looking for a bookmark from the William James Bookstore (in Port Townsend) (not online, no link, not surprising). Wm James is located in the building with all the balconies in the picture above. When you buy a book from Wm James, you can climb the stairs to the third floor and sit on the deck Siren’s and watch to ferry boats--so buying books isn't just the bookstore, it is the hour or two spent reading, maybe drinking a PT I.P.A over the water, or next to the fire with a tot of Oban.
Reflections shimmer, light on water, this is not a post about Port Townsend, but it is about the search for a bookmark. I didn't find what I was looking for; I know I have at least one somewhere. I decided the best place to look would be in books, especially books that I bought at Wm. James, or books that lived next to those books. What I did find was ephemera of the highest order: an old passport with stamps from a trip with Aster, the night crossing from Vienna into Hungary, the flight into Frankfurt, and out Orly tucked into the Autobiography of Sir William Francis Burton; a card from a hat-maker in Morocco that I had found packed in some things of my grandmother marking Pynchon's discussion of the Herero genocide in V.; my Oxford University Library Services card marked a passage about the formation of the social reform movement, Al-Ahali, in Baghdad, 1933 in Hanna Batatu's tome on the social classes and revolutionary movements of Iraq; a card from Sweet Laurette's in Uptown, PT in Osip Mandelstam, Stone; in a copy of Pale Fire, a cardboard coaster from a cafe in Strasbourg, collected waiting for Aster to finish a class at the Universite' across the street, letting her buy me lunch, realizing that her success at moving to a foreign city, finding an apartment, buying groceries, attending classes in a language not her own, had fundamentally changed our relationship in a wonderful, natural way; in Alberto Moravia's The Women of Rome, a ticket stub from a flight to San Diego; a card from a film shown at the first Port Townsend Film Festival marking the The Hour of Swallows chapter in The Spider's House...and on and on...
So, reflections beget resolutions: I resolve to make some bookplates this year, I have a few images collected: Stephen Mallarme asked his friend Manet to make him a Raven bookplate, because he was so taken with 'Edgar Poe'--I tracked down a facsimile, published in a book written by Caroline Ticknor in 1916, the original may or may not be in a bookcase in Providence, RI. It is quite wonderful. I'll post a scan. There are some wonderful wood blocks that are part of a book about Walter Benjamin that is sitting in my carrel, they too have potential. Ideally, I will find a small press here in the valley, or make linoblocks, find just the right paper, and pot of glue, it will be a project.
Photos stewickie, Painting by Michael Hale.
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