The Book Nook

That's what I'd call it if I had a bookstore. It would look like that store featured in "You've Got Mail" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks...well, that is what the front would look like, all quaint and peaceful. In back, it would be the size of Amazon with escalators and room upon room where hundreds upon hundreds of holograms would play like movies and you could jump in and BE Princess Leia if you wanted to, or watch The Velveteen Rabbit exactly as you imagined it to be...or dig in the garden or make that mad plunge down the water fall slide on the cover of the Travel Magazine.

I had a similar experience at school one semester. No, not a holographic interactive room at The Book Nook but a job where I worked a few hours a week for the library. It was quite a boring tedious job that I was totally unsuited for.



Eight years before my arrival, this university had built a huge new library of limestone and glass (it has since been added and added onto) and Hundreds and Hundreds of boxes were still stored up in the attic. Books needed to be accounted for and properly shelved.

My job was to take a LONG list of books up to the attic and search for them in the hundreds of boxes that literally WERE the floor of the attic...This was my first experience at finding a needle in a haystack.

There was no AC up there, so it was hot and dusty and I hardly knew where to begin. I opened and pulled books from one box then another and another hoping to find just ONE book on the list. I stumbled across MANY interesting looking old books. Not at all like the books we have marketed to us today.




These books were OLD in caparison.



In high school I wrote poetry and shared it with friends and read their poetry. I kept a folder with all the aquired poetry in a drawer in my white French provincial desk which sat on my pink carpet beside my white bean bag chair. I would spend hours sifting through the writings of myself and others. So when I pulled an old book of poetry from one of those dusty boxes up in that huge attic I couldn't resist the urge to carefully sift through the fragile pages.

The Copyrights were OLD


The pages looked to have been individually cut and were not uniform at all. There were additions to the book, what look like magazine articles clipped and glued in.


There are handwritten details in pencil and another 'tip in'...I believe that is what it's called.

This tip in was added from a change Ms. Teasdale made in '31 and lays over the original printed page.



I do not know if the book dates to the 1920 printing of the 1907 copyright or if the book was printed in the 1930s after the publisher added the above tip in dated Sept 23 '31 in what appears to be a handwritten update by Ms. Teasdale. Perhaps someone reading this can tell me. Perhaps the tip in was added by the consumer.

Ms. Teasdale was Victorian in her roots, married at the age of 30, divorced at the age of 45. In 1918, she received the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (the forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America for her volume, Love Songs. And she quietly ended her life in 1933 one January day by ingesting an over dose and taking to her bathtub for a long soak. She was 48. (Wikpedia.com) There are more details of her life and social experiences available online.

It has been a long time since I crawled around in that attic looking for books and sneezing from the dust. I still love looking at the pages of these old Teasdale poetry books, reading her spirited, at times biting, poetry and thinking of the life lead by Ms. Teasdale. I had promised a confession in this blog but I am refraining. Perhaps you can fill that in for me. :)

Thank you for visiting my blog today.

I am off to the Thrift Store to see what I need that I don't know yet...lol!

Have a marvelous weekend!

Cottage blessings,
Melissa