Spring is in the air - or maybe it's just in my step - with the scent of love wafting back from this coming fertility season all the way from Great Britain and the latest personal ads in the London Review of Books.We provide these as a public service to warm and gladden hearts during this bitter cold snap in the U.S.As always, response box numbers have been deleted to protect the innocently guilty or guiltily innocent.As for you, you're an adult and don't need your hand held - unless for long, slow, candle-lit walks backward on the beach at...
Library’s Letters Reveal The Real Van Gogh
Still Life With Plate Of Onions, 1889, Oil on Canvas.Note the letter and the book. This painting is said to refer to Charles Dickens' remedy against suicide: "A daily glass of wine, a piece of bread and cheese, and a pipe with tobacco."London's Royal Academy Museum and Library will host the city's first major exhibit of the works of Vincent van Gogh in over 40 years beginning January 23, 2010. Curated in conjunction with Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum and Library, the show is entitled: The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. The letters of Van Gogh, borrowed from...
Sisters In Opium: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Louisa May Alcott
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, radiant opium addict.“I am writing such poems - allegorical - philosophical - poetical - ethical - synthetically arranged! I am in a fit of writing - could write all day & night - and long to live by myself for three months in a forest of chestnuts & cedars, in an hourly succession of poetical paragraphs & morphine draughts.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to her brother, 1843.“Opium - opium - night after night!” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning.“Heaven bless hashish, if dreams end like this!” - Louisa May Alcott, Perilous Play (1869).Of delicate constitution to begin with, Elizabeth...
When "Little Women" and "Little Men" Get Together, Hubba-Hubba
True first editions of Little Women and Little Men in the publisher's original cloth.“I plod away, through I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls, or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it... Sent twelve chapters to Mr. N [Thomas Niles, her editor at Roberts Brothers]. He thought it dull; so do I. But I work away and mean to try the experiment; for lively, simple books are very much needed for girls, and perhaps I can supply the need.” - Journals of Louisa May Alcott, 1868.Another...
U.S. Gov’t Recall Alerts Readers: These Books May Shock You!
Beware the Water Garden of Doom.In what may be a category first, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a voluntary recall of nine books, in concert with their publisher.Consumers should stop reading these books immediately unless otherwise instructed, and contact Oxmoor House for a full refund.“About 951,000” copies of these books, on shelves from January 1975 through December 2009 for between $13 and $35, are currently in circulation, posing a threat to personal and residential safety. No fires, shocks, burns, injuries or deaths of any nature, including disbelief, have yet been reported as a result of these...