It had to happen. I had to say goodbye. But it wasn’t easy.
I started at The Alliance Review in 2002 and discovered the Rodman Public Library book sales that summer. I also discovered The Concern, the church-run thrift shop in Sebring with a little corner by the stairs devoted to books. I had shopped at North Canton Public Library’s book sales for many years, until I discovered RPL and The Concern and their much lower prices. NCPL for many years sold books for reasonable prices but a few years ago started charging $2 and $3, about the same time Goodwill raised its prices to a similar level. Gone, I thought, were the days when I could buy a book on the slim chance it would be good. When books cost 25 or 50 cents, I’m less discriminating and grab anything that looks vaguely interesting. But at $2 or $3, I’m much more discerning. Read the rest of this entry »

“… the soft and slumbrous snow” (Elizabeth Akers Allen), says “Roget’s International Thesaurus, in a lengthy word list that also offers “feather’d rain” (William Strode), “a flaky torrent” (George Crabbe), “snow blast, snow squall, flurry, blizzard, driven snow, snowcap, snow blanket, snow bed, snow field, mantle of snow, snowscape, snowslide, slush and slosh, which most Ohioans have experience in spades the past two months or so.
Our wintry February stands in stark contrast to Christmas Day, when rain fell in torrents for hours. But a Dec. 27 snow left a thick blanket the next morning, and a bit more fell on Dec. 31. Snow fell on several days the first week of January, the heaviest on Jan. 7. The next day, snow still falling, I tied Eutzly to a pine tree by the driveway, hoping he would entertain himself by eating bark and twigs while I shoveled, but he kept tugging at his leash, bothered by the snow, so I returned him to his dry house and finished the job sans chevre. I shoveled again the next day, and that time Eutzly was content to stand under the tree and bite bark. That night the temperature dropped to zero before regaining a few degrees. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the Fall 1987 Banana Republic catalog, which includes an essay scattered through the catalog titled “On the Road to Mandalay.” Read the rest of this entry »

Banana Republic, owned by Mel and Patricia Ziegler, marketed safari, adventure and travel gear and clothing through a colorful, creative, clever catalog in the 1980s, playing on the great adventure tales set mainly in the tropics but also in higher latitudes. It paid tribute to explorers wearing pith helmets, writers who lived their adventures, classic movies, and the classic and classy clothing and accessories these explorers sported, all written in a travelogue style that seemed tongue in cheek but which was immensely entertaining, complemented by drawings and beautiful full-color paintings of products and places. This was the decade of Indiana Jones and Magnum P.I., when khaki shirts and camouflage gear were in style, but by the 1990s BR had mutated to just another clothing store. These pages are from a hardcover book published in 1986 that summarized the many small softcover catalogs issued over the years. Read the rest of this entry »

I get the heebie-jeebies just reading about the narrow passages negotiated by Kentuckian Floyd Collins. In the 1900s, when Mammoth and nearby caves were private property and served as sometimes profitable tourist attractions, Collins explored subterranean frontiers in the Flint Ridge area near Mammoth Cave, hoping to find a moneymaking cave for his family.
After a failed attempt in 1917 to turn a profit on Great Crystal Cave, in January 1925 Collins spent three weeks beneath a sandstone ledge on a private farm enlarging a small opening and clearing debris from a twisting, sloping shaft. The passage dropped diagonally about 15 feet, straight down a few feet, and diagonally again; doubled under itself, narrowing to a vertical drop and squeeze that barely admitted Collins; dropped diagonally again, tapering to 10 inches high, and reached an alcove barely big enough for Collins to turn around in. A few feet farther a chute dropped 10 feet to a cubbyhole and a diagonal body-sized crevice. That’s the stuff that gives me the creeps, those narrow body-sized passages. Read the rest of this entry »

Mammoth Cave’s first great explorer
Stephen Bishop was more fortunate, in some ways, than most of his kind. He spent his days doing something he loved, exploring Mammoth Cave, finding previously unknown passages, pits and chambers and leading tourists through a subterranean wonderland. “He is the model of a guide — quick, daring, enthusiastic, persevering, with a lively appreciation of the wonders he shows,” said travel writer Bayard Taylor. Stephen was well versed in geology, geography, history, literature and Greek mythology. But when Bishop returned to the land above ground, he was still a slave. Read the rest of this entry »

Gulf Oil sponsored this tribute to the Apollo program in 1969. The book is bound in sturdy cloth binding with heavy full-color pages. If it were made today, the pages would be glossy; that’s one reason I like older books better. I’m not enraptured with glossy paper. The 77-page book includes a list of NASA contact information, a section on further reading, a list of manufacturers of the moonship components, a list of space organizations, and a space glossary titled “How to Talk Space.” Read the rest of this entry »

Heavy snow graced our area on Friday. I can say “graced” because I did not work and had the luxury of watching the snow fall with no need to drive in it. The snow began while I did some shopping on Friday afternoon and was sticking to the roads when I returned home between 3 and 4 p.m. It was a southern system, a low pressure system bearing white tidings from the Gulf of Mexico, and we northern Ohioans, who often see lake effect snow storms that inundate our northeasternmost counties, experienced the opposite, the heaviest snow falling in the mid-state and southerly counties. I measured 12 inches on my picnic table, and the National Weather Service radio had reported up to 20 inches possible in Carroll County, just to the south. On a trip to Cleveland on Sunday, I observed that snow was very light, maybe 2 inches deep, and I could see grass patches through the light snow cover. When we returned from our outing, to see the Baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire, I was struck again by the height of the banks of snow I had shoveled from the driveway. Read the rest of this entry »

These reproductions of Parker fountain pen ads were published in the hardcover 1996 Parker desk calendar. Read the rest of this entry »