Edible Book Festival

"For certain voracious readers, April 1 has become a red-letter day: It's the one time of the year when they get to eat books. They won't eat just any book, only those prepared especially for the occasion, known as the Edible Books Festival . . ." Blake Eskin, "Books to Chew On," NY Times, March 26, 2006.

I will never make the claim, "You heard it first, here at Catholic Bibliophagist!" because I am generally the last person to know about anything.

The International Edible Book Festival, was dreamed up by Judith A Hoffberg, a California librarian, during a Thanksgiving dinner in 1999. It is observed annually on April 1st which is not only an appropriate day for biblio-silliness, but also the birthday of the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote "The Physiology of Taste" in 1825.

Here are some pictures from the 2006 celebration held at Duke Univerity. Warning: some of these entries get rather pun-ish. (I think my favorites are "Flan of Green Gables" and "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss-shimi.")

Naturally, all of these edible books need the Dewey Decimeal (from the Seattle 2006 Festival) to keep them in order.

I will have to seek out a local observance of the Edible Book Festival in 2008. If I can't find one, perhaps we can hold one online here at Catholic Bibliophagist.

Earthquake! (1:53 AM)

But just a little one. According to the preliminaray report, it was a 4.2 magnitude located 3 miles north of Wrightwood, CA. (So I probably wouldn't have even felt it down here had I not been awake and blogging.)

Being a native Californian, I was under the the computer table within nanoseconds. And I scarcely had time to be glad that I'd bolted the bookcases to the walls before it was over.

Public Service Announcement: Catholic Bibliophagist urges her readers to hoard books responsibly! Get those bookcases properly bolted to the walls. She lived in a neighboring community during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, so she knows what she is talking about!

At that time we did not have any of our bookcases properly bolted, but I had taken the precaution of placing all tall bookcases is a separate library room which was not also a bedroom. Let me repeat that: Never put tall bookcases where they could fall on you while you sleep! We lost several bookcases during that quake. The Billy bookcases from Ikea were pretty stable. But several other kinds either fell over or collapsed. One of them collapsed sort of sideways across the closed door of the library which blocked our entrance to the room for quite some time.

Our kids still remember that earthquake fondly because after Daddy checked for major damage and gas leaks, they all got to huddle in our bed and listen to him read aloud The Hobbit. (He thought it would provide a distraction and help them to calm down. He was right.)

We Wants One!

Okay, I don't really need these. I know perfectly well which books are where in my home library. But they appeal to the library geek in me. When you click the link, scroll down to the bottom of the page to read their suggestions on how to set up and label your library "so that your reading flourishes." La!

My Mind Is Going, Dave . . . I Can Feel It.

When I was young I could remember everything I'd ever read.

Even now I can recall a story in one of my early grade school readers about a king who set a seemingly impossible task: the fulfillment of his desire for a dessert that was both hot and cold. Naturally, a clever young boy solved the problem by inventing the first hot fudge sundae. (It wasn't much of a story, I suppose. But it made a deep impression on me -- probably because it was head and shoulders above the boring exploits of Dick and Jane.)

But with the passage of time and the increasing muliplicity of books under my belt, it's sometimes hard for me to recall whether or not I've already read a particular work. Yet once my eyes run over a page or so, connections in the brain start snapping and I know if I've read it before. And I don't just remember reading it, I recognize the look of the the page. (That's also the reason I don't need bookmarks; a page always looks different after it's been read. Almost as if it had become a different color.)

But now it's finally happened. Yesterday I read Tomorrow The Stars, a short story collection edited by Robert A. Heinlein. My copy has a bookplate in it with my maiden name, so I'm almost certain I bought this while I was in college. In those days I didn't own many books, so no book I bought ever went unread. But as I worked my way through the stories in this volume, I didn't recognize any of them. How could this be?

Then I got up to the ninth story in the collection, "Betelgeuse Bridge" by William Tenn. Within a page and a half I was certain I'd read it before. In fact, I'd remembered details about it that could not have been the result of a lucky predictive guess. (Towards the end of the collection I also found a second familiar story, "Misbegotten Missionary" by Isaac Asimov. But Asimov is so widely anthologized that I could easily have read it elsewhere.)

So what am I to think?

That I read only one story out of this collection which I bought at a time when I was an even more voracious reader than I am now?

That I forgot all of the stories except one?

I suppose this is the sensible hypothesis, but it scares me. One of my elderly relatives has Alzheimer's disease, which to me seems like a fate worse than death. And they say there are genetic factors involved. . .

I discussed this once with my daughter, Fillia, who brightly assured me that if I ever got Alzheimer's she'd keep me happy by sitting me in a chair with a book to read. "You could just read the same one over and over again, Mom." Somehow, that was not as comforting a prospect as she'd intended. Yes, I know that not every middle-aged memory lapse is a sign of creeping dementia. But so much of my mental landscape is made up of things I've read that it's disconcerting to have even the smallest pebbles of it evaporate.

I'm Not Dead Yet

I haven't posted here since October 2nd which, in the blogiverse, is probably equivalent to about an eon and a half. What can I say? Sometimes life happens. A lot of mine has taken place in hospitals or emergency rooms in the company of elderly relatives. And then we lost our phone service (and therefore email and Internet access) for a day and a half.

So while I catch up with things I am posting a link to Heros in Storytelling, Barbara Nicolosi's notes for a talk which she gave to the San Diego Christian Writers Guild. She surveys the contemporary audience's perception of and attitude towards heroes. She asks why we should care if there are no heroes. She talks about what a hero is -- and about what things are not heroic. Her field is movies, but I think her observations are applicable to the writing of any kind of fiction.

Good Advice

"Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure."
--Hilaire Belloc, Bad Child's Book of Beasts, dedication.

Unpacking My Life As a Quilter

Quilting is my other passion, and it's reflected in my library. Yesterday I was unpacking my collection of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. I have issues going back to 1970. Though I've been fascinated by quilts ever since I was very young, I was not a subscriber in those days. In fact, I had never even heard of QNM.

I discovered the magazine in the early 1990s. At that time, in response to an unhappy family event, I took one of my earlier abortive attempts at quiltmaking out of my cedar chest and sewed it together. At about the same time I discovered an online quilting community, the Online Quilters, through Prodigy, an early Internet Service Provider. It was a heady experience not unlike my previous discovery of fantasy and science fiction fandom. Despite the strictures of an online environment, we Online Quilters used Prodigy's bulletin boards (and the US Postal Service) to swap quilt blocks and fabric squares; to place group orders for specialized tools; to give lessons and hold workshops; and to participate in co-operative projects such as group quilts and round robins.

Outsiders wondered how we could become such close friends of people we'd never met face to face. Actually, we did occasionally meet at quilt shows. We wore blue fabric stars (based on Prodigy's logo) to identify ourselves and held "show & tell" (a traditional quilt guild activity) in the parking lots outside the shows.

(Later, due to conflicts with Prodigy's restrictions on content and its erratic deletion of bulletin board messages, most of us migrated to GEnie where we merrily continued our online quilt life.)

A lot of my basic knowledge of quilting came originally from the Online Quilters, including the merits of Quilter's Newsletter.

The first issue of QNM was published in September, 1969. At that time there were few quilting books available, no quilt stores, and none of the specialized tools quilters now take for granted. One hundred per cent cotton was difficult to find having been replaced with polyester-cotton blends. It was the age of bonded double knits. (Shudder!) Bonnie Leman began publishing QNM just ahead of the explosion of renewed interest in quilting which began in the early '70s which has continued unabated to the present day.

I acquired most of my back issues in the mid '90s when my local quilt guilt decided to sell off its collection at the annual Trash 'n Treasures meeting.

And what a treasure it was! I managed to snag over ten year's worth. Paging through the early issues was a time-traveling journey back to a day when hand piecing was still dominant and templates did not include seam allowances. Rotary cutters had yet to be invented and it was still rather daring to assert that machine quilting could be a legitimate option. Wall hangings, (i.e. small quilts that are hung up for decoration) were looked down upon by a certain faction of quiltdom who felt that a quilt wasn't really a quilt unless it covered a bed.

Paging through my collection, I've watched the rise and fall of various techniques and styles of quiltmaking. (I recall at least two articles on how to make quilts from scraps of bonded polyester knit!) I've read early articles by people who are now big names in the field. Through the pages of QNM I've watched the quilting community grow from scattered, isolated people swapping copies of patterns published in the 1930s by newspapers like the Kansas City Star, to a large diverse group of individuals ranging from those who consider themselves to be mere crafters to those who see themselves as serious artists. And they are supported by an enormous industry selling fabrics and tools that were undreamed of in 1969.

And occasionally the world of the Online Quilters and the world of QNM intersected. In the April '91 issue, p. 37, is a picture of Diane Rode Schneck's quilt, "Ugly Tie Contest." She made it with fabrics from our annual Ugly Fabric Swap. I can see the fabric I contributed, right there! The peach colored one with the little black locomotives.

Thanks to the Internet (and a current subscription), I now have a fairly complete collection of Quilters Newsletter. But I'm still missing quite a few issues between 1969 and 1972. If anyone out there has some that need a loving home, let me know.