A Wonderful Web Site I Found

There is so much on the web regarding all things literary and bookish that I found it is often overwhelming.

I have no idea where I found the following website but I thought I would post it up because I must say I think it is one of the better ones I have found.

The address is:  http://www.literarytraveler.com

An example of their articles. Even if you didn't book a tour
you can get a good idea these places exist and go on your own.

It is a website that combines travel around the world with various authors and the places where they either lived or wrote about.

For example the latest edition has a lovely article of a place to get the feel for The Great Gatsby on Long Island, New York.

There is another article about Cuba related to that country's literature and also articles about interesting people who were either authors or involved with them.

One can sign up for the newsletter at the site and so far I have only received a couple of newsletters so they aren't bombarding my email box as often happens.

I hope it is something you might enjoy as much as I do as I have often enjoyed the travels of book bloggers and their wonderful photos and you might just find some interesting places not far from where you live to visit that tie in with a favourite book.

For example I am visiting family in the United States in November and will spend about 10 days in the San Francisco area.  I am hoping to visit the Jack London National Park at Sonoma California and the John Steinbeck Centre near Monterey California.

No doubt I am going to get some new ideas from this newsletter.

Bikes instead of Books today

Photo from their Facebook page.

Saturday was meant to have been rainy and blustery. A few of us had planned a camping weekend but it had to be cancelled. So Saturday morning dawned and the sun was shining. And there was little wind. Hmmm... a Bike Day.

A small group of us met for coffee about 10:30 am at Moto Vechio cafe on the Eastern Shore of Hobart. It is a relatively new cafe and the decor speaks to motorbike enthusiasts. Old restored and semi restored bikes are parked along the walls. The Ulysses Bike group members upon presentation of their card get a 15% discount on food and drink and the owners and staff always smile. Also as one member pointed out they don't charge an extra 50 cents for soy milk in our coffee. We all have our favourite benefits in life.

We finished the coffees and toast and the sun continued to shine. Off we went down to the wharf on the bikes where the Tall Ships are visiting.

Tall Ships Hobart, Tasmania (Photo from Hobart Mercury Newspaper)

However they were docked, no sails up and the crowds were crushing.  I will try to see them when they sail away up the river on Wednesday.

We escaped for country roads farther south and ended up at Grandvewe. Grandvewe is a dairy farm of sheep. They have a beautiful little cafe that looks out over Birches Bay to the south of Hobart. The ewes are lambing and the lambs of course are gorgeous.

The view over Birche's Bay south of Hobart. Beautiful farmland.
Photo by Terina

How cute is this little fella.  Photo by Terina

They have cheese tastings of their dairy cheese which is excellent, yesterday I tasted a fine blue cheese that was quite mild but lovely none the less.

Trav Penguin didn't get down there as he was home wrapped up in a Kindle finishing Kathy Reich's latest book , more on that later, from him.

We had more coffees and teas and some Panini bread with cheese and free range ham with chutney that melted in my hungry mouth.

Photo by Pam

We always love a group photo.  That is 'moi'  on the far left. Photo by Terina

Then back onto the bikes and back to Hobart.  It turned out to be a beautiful day with great friends and the most gorgeous country side in the world. (Or so we think anyway).  Tasmania truly is one of the world's best kept secrets. Enjoy the photos.

Our mate Terina has a camera on her bike.
This is our group heading back north to
Hobart (a trip of about 45 minutes)
Photo by Terina

You Can Now Say, " I Told You So". Go ahead, I can take it.

Balzac's Droll Stories from 1870's by Balzac
(Will have its own post one of these days.)

 For some unknown reason (one of those times when it seemed like a good idea at the time), I got up on my high horse and said I was not going to buy another book until the end of 2014. (here).

The weather was having a fake summer whilst still winter and I was in a very high mood and felt very strong.  Well the past week has been cold, I haven't left the house in a week and my mood was starting to fall fast. I moved from bed to couch to bed, food in hand, a stack of books beside me, cheap magazines and internet fully charged. I woke up this morning and thought, "Right - get up, get out."  I felt like I was in training for living in a nursing home.

Besides I kept thinking my old haunt, Imperial Books, which is a great second hand book shop in Hobart had changed its name to Spineless and Cracked.  I was curious to know if they had new owners. T. was going in to the gym today so I said I'd ride along with him and do some errands in town and I could check out the bookshop to see what the story is.

A lovely old Wodehouse Penguin No 995
first published that shop owner had set
aside for me.

I also had a monthly retirement check from the 14 years I worked in Florida to deposit. It arrives the first week of the month like clockwork. I have to go into town, stand in a line, speak to the bank "specialist" because a regular teller is not able to deposit it. Then I have to pay a $10.00 fee and have a 28 day hold put on it. It is a bloody nuisance but it does get me into town.
There is another bank I could take it too but they have a 35 day wait on it and the one I go to often forgets to log in the 28 day hold and I can access it immediately. Each month they ask me, "Why don't you have this directly deposited?"

I tell them that the Florida Retirement System is so archaic they don't have the facility to do so outside of the immediate 50 states of the USA.  The 'specialist' who has a desk to sit at instead of standing at a counter says, "Why not?"  My answer is the same, "Because the state of Florida is too busy monitoring the little car on Mars and wondering how many more people they can send to the moon."  Technology has not caught up with the Florida Retirement system and I must be the only person to ever have retired from the state of Florida who moved to another country.  We all laugh and my check is then deposited.

Photo doesn't do it justice. A teal colour 

Penguin Classic L 77 (first) 1958

So down the street I walk to the second hand book shop to find out the latest there. On my way I have to walk around a very young policeman who has just collared a girl who was part of a screaming gang of girls who ran out of a cheap cosmetics store, making no amount of noise.  She stood there arguing with him as he slapped the handcuffs on her. No doubt an active little shoplifting ring happening.

As for me, I had bigger fish to fry. I had to find out if the news from my favourite second hand bookshop was good or bad.

Turns out it was all good.  In respect to the man who ran the Imperial who died a year and a half ago they didn't want to immediately rename it. So they gave it a year and have now upgraded it and the name.  Of course now everything has been completely rearranged and the wall of Penguin books that was always in one are has disappeared.  The entire back section has been re-shelved with Classic books, anything before 1900 and all literature after that in the Literature section. The popular novels are in their own shelves called "Airport Fiction".  This includes the Robert Ludlums, Danielle Steels and Dan Browns, etc.

Vintage Penguin Classics (firsts)
L 117 and L 76

As for the Penguins? They are now literature and shelved alphabetically by author amongst all the other Lit books. Great.  But back to buying books?  I was so happy the shop only gets better and better and the display of books so excellent I started browsing the shelves looking JUST for Penguins.
However I found some wonderful non Penguins and I thought "Stuff It".  I can think of two bloggers I follow in particular who will make a joke if they read this so maybe this will be the post they don't see?? Is that right Elaine and Thomas??
So this is what I bought. And boy oh boy did it ever feel good. My mood meter went sky high and let's face it books are cheaper than drugs, right?

I can't go past a book that is 

actually about reading.

This looked great.  Originally

written 1920, this copy is a 1947

British Publishers Guild

Enjoy my find and if you are familiar with any of these titles or authors feel free to comment. Or also feel free to say "Ha ha ha" or " I told you that you couldn't do it."  You'd be right. I couldn't but I did go for almost a month.

The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler

This week in Tasmania has been very cold. It does this every year. We get a week of 20 degree + temps at the end of winter (70's F) and everyone breaks out their summer clothes and then, Wham ! the winds come from the south (Antarctica) and we freeze.  I have not even left the house this week because I can't get warm.

So the Penguin and I were wondering what we could do. We looked at the bookshelves in the front room and decided to go to New York. After  all it is summer there now going into fall and we thought we could enjoy some interesting sights and weather. Mind you the Travellin Penguin doesn't mind the cold as much as I do but he does like getting into a book that takes place in New York.

The Bookstore is Deborah Meyler's first novel. It was enjoyable if a bit uneven in parts.  Esme is a young English woman who has received a scholarship to do her PhD in Art History at Columbia University. She lives in a small apartment in Manhattan and has fallen in love with a real New York blueblood man who has dashing good looks and pretty much sweeps her off her feet. His name is Mitchell van Leuven.  I won't tell you what kind of man Mitchell is but his character is drawn up very well and readers will definitely have opinions about how they feel about him.

Of course she is so swept away that she becomes pregnant which of course was not in her plans at all. When she then gets dumped she has a myriad of decisions to make. Will she keep the baby? Will she terminate it?  How will she earn money?  How she supports herself in Manhattan is part of what I found a bit uneven in this book.

She gets a job working at The Owl, a second hand bookshop near where she lives. The hours are flexible enough for her to continue attending her art classes, visit museums to study the paintings she loves and try to sort out her on again/off again love for Mitchell.

What I enjoyed the most about this book were the characters who worked in the bookstore. The author based them on people and experiences she had when she worked for 6 years in a New York bookstore.  I also loved the descriptions of New York, especially late at night when it was raining out and the shop workers sat around talking, playing music and enjoying one another's company.

Was the story predictable?  Not entirely but I thought it could be. I also liked the way Esme got on with her life, kept going to classes, studying art, working and continuing her friendships even when her life was falling apart. A lot of novels of this ilk are not quite like that.  No one was going to rock up on a white horse and save her, she was going to save herself although that was a bit of a rocky path.

I won't say anymore as I don't want to spoil it but on a cold day, Travellin Penguin and I enjoyed our warm tracky daks, wrapped up in a doona, with the blinds open, watching the birds and being in New York, sitting in Central Park in the sun, breathing the dust in The Owl and watching other people get on with their lives and watch what decisions they made.  I would be interested in knowing what others thought of this book as I don't know anyone here who has read it.

An Art Book Replaces the Challenge

Grant Wood (1891-1942):
American Gothic - 1930

Okay, I have had enough of answering all the questions about the Book Blogging Information.  It served its purpose after answering the first 8 questions. I feel going on to finish all 15 would be flogging a dead tree.

It was a good exercise to get motivated to write a bit more and think about the whole blogging issue.  That has been accomplished. It was starting to get repetitive and if I get bored then it defeats the whole purpose.

I'd rather write about books than blogs.

From My Bookshelf is American Art. I came across this in a second hand book shop in Hobart.  I have always loved Grant Wood's American Gothic. It is at the Art Institute in Chicago according to this book and although I have never seen the original I grew up with it.  It used to pop up regularly in ads that I remember or as a bit of comedy as people have tinkered with it over the years.   It is quite iconic to the United States.


The English version was first published in 1972 by Octopus Book Lmtd. London and this copy was distributed in Australia by Angus and Robertson.  What I find interesting is the book was originally published in Italian by Fratelli Fabbri Editore in 1966 Milan.  This particular book doesn't seen to ever have visited North America.

It was the cover that attracted me to it and as it's in a great condition with dust jacket I thought it would be a lovely addition to my collection.

The 87 Colour Illustrations are well done and are very varied as you can see in the small sample below.

Jack Levine (born 1915) : Welcome Home !
1946 - New York - Brooklyn Museum

This book is part of a series that includes African Art, Classical Greece, Art Nouveau, Chinese Art, Christian ARt, Egyptian Art, Impressionism, Indian Art, Japanese Art, Pre-Columbian Art and Roman Art.

Stuart Davis (born 1894): The Paris bit. New York,
Whitney Museum of American Art

The book not only has examples of various American art work but has full colour photo plates of various  museums that the art is housed in as well as photos of the various homes some of the artists live in. Frank Lloyd Wright had an amazingly large home and no doubt it would be great to go through it.


So I hope people enjoy this short interlude away from more blog babbling and have a quick look at the photos presented from the book.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) : Portrait
of Mrs. X    18884 New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art