Treasures from the Past

Used bookstores. Is there anything better than an afternoon spent hunting through the shelves and stacks in one? As delightful as a new bookstore is, visiting a used bookstore is a trip into unknown, mysterious waters: who knows what treasures might be found on the shelves?

One treasure I found in a used bookstore (and I can’t even remember which one, now) several years ago is Maud, edited by Richard Lee Strout and published in 1938. It’s the diary of a Miss Isabella Maud Rittenhouse (who generally used her middle name), a comfortably middle-class young lady from Cairo, Illinois, down at the very bottom of the state where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet (which made for a very watery city—it did, and still does, flood regularly.) She kept it between 1881, when she was sixteen and a junior in high school, to just before her marriage in 1895 at age thirty. And oh, what a diary!

Maud paints herself as small and ugly, but she was evidently extraordinarily charming, based on the number of friends and admirers she had. She was also quite energetic, and not only went to art school in St. Louis, but also maintained an art studio, acted and sang in local amateur theater, and became a frequent contributor of stories and articles to national magazines.

Her writing talent is clear in her amazing diary. Some entries run thousands of words long and describe outings to New Orleans and the Chicago Worlds’ Fair, or boating on the spring floods, or the dresses she makes and the china she paints, or the people who come to life from her pen. The prose has a remarkably fresh, modern, alive feel to it, even as the people and events it describes are very 19^th century. What's most remarkable, though, is that the story of her younger years actually has a plot: she has many beaus and suitors and falls in love several times, but keeps coming back to one young man to whom she doesn't feel much connection but respects enormously for his integrity and honesty...until mere weeks before their wedding, it's revealed that he has embezzled thousands of dollars from his former employer. Poor Maud is devastated but meets a new sweetheart and becomes engaged...until her new fiancé breaks the engagement. Five year later, he proposes again...and this time Maud and her handsome doctor get to live happily ever after.

I see that used copies are available online (check Abebooks, for one, and eBay.) If you should ever run across a copy at your favorite used bookstore, I highly recommend it!

Mudlarking!

I love to walk on the beach. Even more, I love to look for treasures as I walk.

Living my entire life on or near the coast of Massa-chusetts, I’ve kind of taken it for granted that any walk on a beach of my home state might turn up treasures beyond a pretty scallop shell or a tumbled piece of rose quartz. This part of the US has been settled since the early 1600s, and over years of beach strolling, I’ve found my share of prizes: clay pipe stems, shards of pottery and glass (and a few intact pieces!), interesting bits of metal from fishing weights to the working mechanism of an oil lamp. My favorite finds include a tiny plate from a doll’s tea set, several ink bottles, and a large piece of early seventeenth century redware pottery.

So it was with great delight and fellow-feeling that I recently devoured Lara Maiklem’s Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames. Mudlarking is the term (dating back to the 18^th century) for rummaging around on the shore of a river or harbor, looking for lost and cast-off items that might be of use; in the last several years, it has more or less become the act of wandering the edges of the Thames at low tide (the Thames below Richmond—where Hampton Court Palace is—is subject to the tide) looking for…well, treasure. Of course, “treasure” is a relative term, so while some do their mudlarking with metal detectors, looking for money or jewelry, others (like Ms. Maiklem) mudlark for the sheer love of history, of connecting to the past through the bits and bobs she finds on her mudlarking trips.

And what bits and bobs she finds! The Thames has hosted human settlements back to the Neolithic, so her collection spans everything from stone tools to Bronze and Iron Age finds, through Roman coins and mosaic tiles to medieval potsherds, Tudor jewelry, eighteenth century Chinese porcelain, and so on up to the present era.  

The book is divided into sections about each stretch of the Thames. In each, Ms. Maiklem entwines the history of that part of the river with accounts of some of her visits and what she has found, juxtaposed with snippets of autobiographical and family history that lend a personal and often moving edge to the narrative. It’s a lovely, absorbing read, and I know that when I finally get back to visit London, I’m going to find a mudlarking trip to join. In the meanwhile, however, there’s always the beach right here…

Have you ever been mudlarking? Where did you go, and what did you find?

History Geek Christmas Wishlist, 2019

My goodness. By some fortuitous stroke, the publishing world has released a slew of books this fall that are setting the heart of this history geek to going pitter-pat. If you too happen to proudly claim the history geek moniker, it might not be too late to ask Santa to make some of these appear under your tree.

Dress in the Age of Jane Austen by Hilary Davidson

Just released in November from Yale University Press, this is a look at the clothes worn by all classes, male and female, during the “long Regency”, 1795-1825. It’s lavishly illustrated with formal portraits, fashion plates, amateur sketches and drawings of the era, and photos of extant examples. Awesome book; I already got a copy (yay for Barnes and Noble coupons!) and I’m making myself wait till the day after Christmas to dive in, because I know I will be totally engrossed.

The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern by Robert Morrison

Published in April, here’s another broad overview of the history and culture of the Regency in England (covering the actual Regency years, 1811-1820). There have been a few of these published in the last five years or so; reviews are generally good, but I haven’t yet had a look at it. Anyone?

Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen’s England by Rory Muir

I’m very much looking forward to reading this one. Fiction is full of dashing young noblemen who will one day (or already have) inherited their family titles, wealth, and properties...but what happened to their younger brothers who might receive a small inheritance (perhaps from their mothers) but who, overall, usually had to make their own ways in the world? From the book’s description: “If they were to remain ‘gentlemen’, only a few options, such as joining the Church or the army, were available to them. Each of these careers had its own attractions, drawbacks and peculiarities, and Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune is the first exploration of the lifestyle and prospects afforded by these different professions.”

Bloodlust and Bonnets by Emily McGovern

I love me a good graphic novel...and even more, I love me a good, funny, Regency-set graphic novel featuring a vampire-hunting Lord Byron and a motley fellowship including an adventure-hungry young debutante and a mysterious bounty hunter and their increasingly outlandish escapades. This one I may crack on Christmas night, after the dishes are in the dishwasher and the leftovers tucked away in the fridge.

How about you? Any good history geekish books you’ve got on your wishlist?

Have the happiest of holidays, dear readers!

Merry Bookmas?

Christmas and books. They just sort of go together, don’t they?

Well, they do when it comes to my Christmas shopping list.  I don’t give as many as I used to within my immediate family because we all have Nook e-readers and share a Barnes and Noble account—you don’t want to know how many e-books we have! But I always save a few special selections for Christmas giving: daughter #1 is a manga fan (and loves wolves), so she’s getting Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki; daughter #2, who is studying jewelry making, gets the enormous new release Jewelry: The Body Transformed and Indian Jewelry Making, and the whole family is getting some of the newer Asterix books, continued by a new artist and writer team now that Uderzo and Goscinny are no more.

I also have other family that I always get books for at the holidays like my mother in law, to read on the plane as she makes her annual trip to warmer climes. This year it’s A Well Behaved Woman by Therese Ann Fowler, historical fiction about Alva Vanderbilt, and The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck, set during and after World War II.  And my dear friend Liz is getting White Mughals by William Dalrymple, about 18^th century East India Company agents who fell in love with India—and with Indian women.

And—ahem—I may have ordered one or two books for myself, too...The House at Lobster Cove by Jane Goodrich—about an extraordinary house that was destroyed and then rebuilt, each time by two extraordinary people, and The Shepherdess of Elk River Valley by Margaret Duncan Brown, who single-handedly ran her Colorado ranch for nearly fifty years, somehow found their way into my basket.

Are you a holiday book giver? What books are planning to give (or hoping to receive?)

What’s on Your TBR Pile?

Ah, books.

They’re lovely things, aren’t they? Lying provocatively on coffee tables, just inviting visitors to leaf through them...standing at attention spine-out on shelves, their colorful bindings drawing the eye...and of course, piled in tottering stacks next to bedside tables, patiently waiting their turns to be read. And we aren’t even going to discuss e-readers, which lose in the aesthetic appeal department but gain in the sheer number of volumes that can be hoarded stored on one device.

For extreme booklovers, TBR (To Be Read) piles can often assume alarming proportions. Friends of mine on the book cataloguing site LibraryThing (if you’re a member, come and friend me there!) refer not to their TBR piles but their TBR hills and mountains (my favorite nickname for a TBR pile there is “Mount Toober.”) ☺

With a TBR pile of such epic proportions, the problem is a complicated one: how do you choose what to read next? Some acquaintances close their eyes and try for a random pick (possibly dangerous if choosing a tome near the bottom of the pile.) I’m not made of such stern stuff; I have to be in the mood for a particular type, so pulling out a cozy mystery won’t do when I’m in a humorous fantasy or a historical non-fiction mood.* Which means I often get lost in my TBR pile, looking for exactly the right book to scratch the reading itch of the moment. It can take a while...

So tell me about your TBR piles, NineteenTeen readers. Are they actual piles lovingly accumulated, or neatly typed lists of your next library borrows? Do you have a system for choosing what next to read, or is it a spur of the moment thing? And after you’ve posted here, go check out the Twitter hashtag #TBRDive, where readers are posting about their latest forays into the wilds of their TBR piles.

Have fun!


*Contrary to what I wrote here, my current reading is actually in the mystery realm--the Calleshire novels by mystery writer Catherine Aird, a series of semi-cozy procedural mysteries set in a fictional English county in the 20th century. Though I may pause my sojourn in Calleshire for Kim Newman’s new release, The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School. Decisions, decisions!

Worth a Drum Roll: New Publisher!

[No guesses on where Marissa has gone? You know you want to try. Come on! It sounds very cold, but is very cool! 😊]

Many of you know that, since my beloved Love Inspired line closed, I have been on the hunt for a new publisher. I will continue to publish the Fortune’s Brides series largely on my own, with a novella coming out in October and the next full-length book, Never Vie for a Viscount, coming in November.

I am also delighted and excited to report that I have accepted a three-book deal with Revell!

Now, publishers often seem less well known than the authors they publish. You might recognize such names as Irene Hannon, Amanda Cabot, Lynette Eason, and Jan Drexler. (If you haven’t heard of Rachel Fordham yet, you will!) 

You might also recognize some of their beautiful covers.

My books will be historical romances set around the early days of our national parks (late 1800s). The first features a determined young lady photographer who wrangles a spot on a Corps of Engineers survey of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1871, only to discover the leader of the expedition is the love she once left behind. A Scenic Beauty (title tentative) is scheduled for publication in October 2019.

I haven’t decided on the other two parks to be featured, though I am leaning toward Yellowstone and my own Mt. Rainier.

Any suggestions? 

Happy New Year, Dear Readers!

First of all, Happy 2017 to you, our dear readers! Regina and I hope you’ll continue to read along as we squee over 200-year-old fashions, tell weird history stories, talk about our books, and generally have fun.

And speaking of reading along...believe it or not (yeah, I’m kinda struggling with believing it myself) the fact that it’s 2017 means we’ll have been writing NineteenTeen posts for ten years come September. I expect we’ll be posting our one thousandth post some time toward the end of the year, which is kind of mind-boggling...but you know, we wouldn’t do this if we didn’t want to. We hope you’re still enjoying reading as much as we enjoy posting.

Since this is a New Year’s celebration post, there are a couple of things I wanted to do...and one of them is to talk about the books we especially loved over the last twelve months. Are there any books with a historical slant, fiction or non-fiction, that you especially enjoyed last year?

My candidate for Most Awesome Historical Book That I Read in 2016 is this one:

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua is...well, I suppose that it gets categorized as a graphic novel, but it’s so, so much more than that. According to the introduction, Ms. Padua started it as a bit of a lark, but things soon got out of hand (oh, I so know that feeling...) It’s the imagined adventures of two real people, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage and amateur mathematician and celebrity offspring Ada, Countess of Lovelace (the celebrity part being that she was Lord Byron’s daughter.)  The historical part is that Babbage designed what was more or less a steam-powered calculating machine (two of them, actually)...and his friend Lovelace, writing a commentary on the designs, more or less posited what would become today’s field of computer science. In real life, Babbage’s engines were never built and Lovelace died tragically young of cancer...but in Padua’s “pocket universe” they’ve teamed up to use the engines to “to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime—for the sake of both London and science.”

There’s so much to love here—the illustrations are glorious and historically correct (omg, the clothes are right, and so is the Duke of Wellington’s nose!) The story-telling is witty and erudite but never stuffy (I totally want this illustration of Isambard Kingdom Brunel on a t-shirt for my engineer husband and son), but it’s also real and human—Lovelace and Babbage aren’t cardboard figures, but brilliant and funny and in many ways, tragic. If you have the least interest in technological history or science fiction or the Victorian era or or or...read this book!

And in the “Other Things that Require Celebration” department, may I present this: a new cover for By Jove, being re-released next month from Book View Café. Gotta say, I'm in love with it.  Look for more news about By Jove in February. 

Now, dear readers, what's your news? Please tell us about your favorite 2016 book, or what you're bookishly looking forward to

this year...and keep reading!

 

 

(Fireworks image courtesy of noppasinw at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)