My sister was visiting and working on my front garden this past weekend and she made a trip to the Brock Road Nursery, where she picked up this bookmark. As well as some real flowers to plant. Next year I’ll have pics of the fruits of her labours.
Book: Life in the English Country House by Mark Girouard
Some laminated Soviet-era postage stamps featuring different Russian planes. I think I must have picked this up in an estate sale or flea market at some point, since I’ve never been to Russia and don’t know many people who have.
Book: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum
Actually I don’t know if this is a rose. It’s a flower. And it makes a pretty bookmark, but one I’d never use because it feels quite fragile. I think if I dropped it on a hard floor it would shatter. The actual clip part is just plastic but I’m not sure what the decoration is.
Book: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Upper Canada was what Ontario was known as in the olde days. Upper because it was further up the St. Lawrence, as opposed to Quebec, which was Lower Canada. Upper Canada Village is a “living history” tourist destination located in Morrisburg, a town on the St. Lawrence. I think I may have gone there once as a kid, but I don’t remember. If I did, I’m sure I didn’t get this bookmark on that visit so somebody must have got it for me later.
Book: Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is another book-specific bookmark, but a step up from the paper flyer ones. It’s nice to have a special embossed leather bookmark for a favourite book, and Walden has always been one of mine.
Book: Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition by Henry David Thoreau
We’re back with another promo bookmark, this time a classic from a 1981 bodice-ripper. I must have picked up the bookmark at the same time, as it’s been in my collection forever. How could I throw out such a beauty? It’s ravishing!
Looking at it again made me curious about the book. Was it even still in print? I did some digging and found out the following.
(1) The fact that I’d never heard of the author only betrays my ignorance of the genre. Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (1939-2007) “is credited with spawning the modern romance genre” with her 1972 novel The Flame and the Flower, which introduced sex into historical fiction (this comes from Wikipedia). Apparently her novels sold more than 36 million copies and were translated into many different languages.
(2) This particular book is still in print. I found it listed on Amazon, along with a half dozen other historical romances also titled A Rose in Winter. I guess you can’t copyright something so generic.
(3) The Amazon page has the top three “selected highlights” by readers of the Kindle edition. These are the passages that readers thought most worth flagging:
From a time long ago, when her dreams had held such grand illusions of a prince offering a single rose to vow his love to his lady fair, she recalled a legend that a rose found in winter brought the promise of true love found.
“Were a twisted, scar-faced, hunchbacked cripple the only other man on earth, I would surely choose him over you!”
“There is revenge, then there is justice. Sometimes the two are met as one.”
It does my heart good to see that great writing is still being appreciated in the digital age.
Book: A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe
Cool your jets, Ayn Rand fans! I’m not talking about that John Galt.
This John Galt was a Scottish novelist who spent some time in Canada doing various administrative duties before being recalled for incompetence. The city of Galt (now part of Cambridge) is named after him, and he’s credited with the ceremonious “founding” of the city of Guelph in 1827. He tells the story in his autobiography, and it involved chopping down a tree and then having a drink. Since 2007 Guelph has celebrated the first Monday in August as John Galt Day. And before you ask if it’s a holiday, it was already a civic holiday anyway. Canadians love their days off!
Book: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Canadian History by Ann Douglas
Whenever I see this man-in-the-moon profile I think of the short-lived McDonald’s ad campaign featuring Mac Tonight. If you weren’t around watching TV in the 1980s you probably won’t have even heard of that fellow. The quote is from Edith Wharton’s long, and pretty much unreadable, poem “Versalius in Zante.”
Book: The Oxford Companion to American Literature
Question: Where did I pick up all these quilting bookmarks? Now I do like quilts, but I’m pretty sure I never attended any of these events in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They did print a lot of different bookmarks though.
Book: The Guinness Book of Records 1990
I’ve talked before about how you can have special bookmarks made out of rare types of wood or silver, or ones that are creative novelty items. But you can also just pick up free paper bookmarks, which are usually ads for something, at bookstores and libraries. At least you used to always be able to do that. More recently I haven’t seen as many.
On my last trip to the library I did see a pile of these bookmarks though, which really mark the bottom of the bookmark hierarchy. Looks like they just photocopied sheets of the same image and then chopped them up with a paper cutter. But since my aim is to include every sort of bookmark, from high to low, I thought I should give them a post anyway.
Book: The Bungalow Mystery by Carolyn Keene
Alex Good 