Step inside. Some friends who, like me, frequent that bane of productivity, Facebook, alerted me to a piece recently published in the New York Times, about the short-lived Greenwich Village Bookshop and its very special door. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has created a wonderful website for this relic, so that […]

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Ancient coral or ancient ladies’ swimming cap? On the first day of spring, which in New York City was particularly welcome and unseasonably warm, I took a long walk on the sands of Dead Horse Bay, a quiet inlet tucked away not far from Floyd Bennett Field (the City’s very first airport), now abandoned to […]

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While perusing eBay recently, I happened upon the work of Vernon Grant.  Not Vernon Grant the wonderful graphic artist (and father of Kellogg’s Snap, Crackle, and Pop) but Vernon E. Grant the wonderful cartoonist, whose work has never been reprinted to my knowledge, and which seems to be all but unavailable.  I’m not a scholar, […]

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An article in this Sunday’s New York Times celebrates an organization  dedicated to the historical documentation of local ullage (in this case, “local” meaning the 1/3 of the nation comprising the West). ByJESSE McKINLEY TWAIN HARTE, Calif. — Strange where a road trip can begin: a dorm room, a bar stool or Page 283 of […]

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JOHN COOPER.

John Cooper was a little boy, whose father and mother lived in a cottage on one side of a village green. He was his parents’ only child, so that he had no brothers nor sisters to play with. But he had a dog of which he was very fond, and he used sometimes to play with other children on the green. Tom Jones was one of the boys that played with John Cooper. One day he asked John Cooper to go for a long walk with him, instead of going to school. John at first would not consent, but at last he gave way and went with Tom, taking Carlo with him.

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Slatter’s Court was once a motor court on the old Lincoln Highway, serving travellers who passed through Davis, California and needed a place to rest their weary heads. Along its winding lanes, a handful of well-ensconced mobile homes and trailers are nestled among tiny clapboard and stucco cottages (which range from a single room to […]

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Sometime after many debits, credits, and payments in trade and cash for dry goods and groceries were recorded in an 1857 ledger book, one of the early residents of Georgetown Township in Ottowa County, Michigan, made thrifty use of it in pursuit of her literary ambitions.* Beautiful ink script chronicling purchases of shoes, flour, candy, […]

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           I recently indulged in an old childhood pleasure — looking through my mother’s own childhood scrapbook.  Its contents are both long-familiar and long-forgotten. But each time I reacquaint myself with the birthday cards, Brownie badges, telegrams, and programs from many Glee Club recitals, something “new” stands out. Just like memory, we see what we need to see, and are blind […]

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