Got up still feeling sick ate breakfast & dashed out of the house. Got to work in time but just made it. At work I did not have much ambition but did the best I could. Then there is a phrase that makes no sense but could easily be the opening line of a story: the horse was upset because Lou Ostnowski had just finished cleaning the house. This book belonged to Ted Mieczynski and he evidently received it on 2/1/39. There is a book mark on July 4th, a blank page, a ditty about PANNING THE BED PAN and stamped in purple by the Thomas W. Roche Lumber Co., with a phone number like they used to be in the good old days, KILdare 7435. As a kid, my number was POTomoac 8744. (Remember CET Television Repairs? Call MOhawk 4-4100, C E T...C E T...) I bought this book, along with a 1922 copy of BEN-HUR for three dollars from a father son book dealership that went out of business, as so many others did when Borders and B&N came to town. Not certain why I chose to post this, just feeling a bit nostalgic, as I always do when the spring weather begins. I hope that Ted M. had a great and hopefully long life, as I sit here feeling immortal, typing while most everyone in the neighborhood is asleep and a gentle breeze flows through my window.
13 comments:
Sleep a bit.....;)
You always get so much of weird things...its kewl:0)
enjoy the sleep;)
Old indie bookshops are great, especially the old used bookstores. My dad owned several over the years. Which is why I grew up reading any damned thing I wished, and why I wandered about in a warehouse packed with a quarter of a million of my dad's old comic books in the mid-60s.
I know those old logbooks you mention. For some reason, my dad always had a few boxes of them. He would go to visit folk to buy their books and somehow end up with those things by the armload. Often, people would toss whatever junk they could get him to carry away with the books. Toys. Artwork. Furniture. 78 records. You name it.
Once, wandering around a big house where he was buying books, he kept seeing photos of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward everywhere. "Why all the photos of Newman and Woodward?"
"Joanne's our daughter," came the reply.
He got some really neat stuff from them. I briefly mucked about with oil paints because they loaded him down with brushes, tubes of oil paints, and blank canvases. I still have the bull fighter paintings by some famous bullfighter that they didn't want any more.
Alas, no one will find our blog posts in 60 years tucked away in some musty corner of an old book shop.
The horse will be disturbed when the servers are purged, I s'pose.
In Arkansas, when I was a kid, we had the big wall phone that had the separate mouthpiece on a cord, and we were on a party line. You knew it was your phone ringing and not somone else on the party line by the length and pattern of the rings. Ours was "two short, one long." Today they'd just say we were on a network.
I love going out and buying old books, I never read them but I love the sense that they have this history and that now by buying it, i'm part of it!
I always enjoy finding things in used books I buy--newspaper articles, old scraps of notes, even a name written in the front cover. It seems to be a case of limited voyeurism, as it allows me to consider what the previous owner is like. Even the highlighting they may have done in the book gives clues about who they are & what they think. I check the dates of old articles, see what they considered worth cutting out & saving. I wonder what the notes are about, if they're obscure. Once I even looked up a previous owner's name on the 'net--& found them.
Similarly, after I bought our house, I found an old, faded photo of a child stuck between a bookcase & the wall. I wondered if the previous owners missed it, if they ever wonder where that picture went...
Immortal..it is good to find another of my kind.
I'm not old enough to know about that way of dialing a phone. Christ, it sounds like science fiction to me. And now look, we got speed dial! Time sure has a way of changing a lot of things, doesn't it?
I love to visit indie book stores! You always find a treasure or two tucked away in helter skelter book shelf with a mixture of paper backs and hardcovers. I found a first edition of Stephen King's Carrie in one of these little stores. I was shocked! Great post!
I love the horse bit. So much to work with there.
I really enjoyed this post but didn't know what else to say....
Um...I had posted a comment here a day or two ago and now it's gone...
Wayne, I think your blog is full of mischievious ghosts! Don't worry, I'll call the Cyboronic GHost Busters! They'll get'em.
Still waiting or you to get back....tick tock:)
Sorry, I think I've gone mad. I forgot you have to check the comments before you post them. I still think you've got ghosts though and those wacky Busters are on their way!
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