As a brief hiatus from antique store hopping I decided to hit the annual Lewisburg Library book sale. The sale opens at 9:00AM, but the other book crazies and I lined up at about 8:30 because this book sale gets insane very quickly (the line also stretched back behind me for quite a ways). Truth be told this is not my favorite book sale in the world. It's big enough to draw annoying book dealers with their even more annoying book dealing scanner machines that they use to check the market value of the books before scooping them up by the dozens and shoving them into their greedy book dealing bags. The literature section was already completely razed by the time I made it there, and I was lined up early like a book groupie! I came away with some good things in the end, though, and I laugh in the face of the book dealer that failed to spot these interesting finds:
This "Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady" is a facsimile reproduction of a 1906 diary discovered in England in the 1970s. It is not a very racy or exciting diary--it is all about nature, but there are tons of illustrations by the artist-diarist as well as excerpts from poems that clearly resonated with her experience of nature. She keeps short records of her daily life and discoveries in nature. "Tonight a toad was discovered jumping about in the hall; it must have come in through the garden door which has been standing open all day. Another day of bright sunshine." That's it?! What happened to the toad? The illustrations of flowers and things are colorful and vibrant and Audubon-like, without requiring the stuffing of birds beforehand. And then, ten feet away, I found what is clearly the companion biography to this diary. These books were probably donated from the same personal library, destined to be separated forever until I came along! These two books alone were well worth the trip to the frenzied book sale.
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