{weekend words} "a mummified world of books"

I haven't done a weekend words for ages, but I've just read this passage about a gorgeous library in John Dickson Carr's He Who Whispers (1946):

And in a long room at the rear of the house – a room after his own heart – stood Miles Hammond, holding a lamp above his head.

'It's all right,' he was saying to himself. 'I didn't make a mistake in bringing her here. It's all right.'

But he knew in his heart that it wasn't all right.

The flame of the little lamp, in its tiny cylindrical glass shade, partly drew the shadows from a mummified world of books. It was wrong, of course, to call this place a library. It was a stack-room, a repository, an immensely long dust-heap for the two or three thousand volumes accumulated like dust by his late uncle. Books old and broken, books newish and shiny, books in quarto and octavo and folio, books in fine bindings and books withered black: breathing their exhilarating mustiness, a treasure-house hardly yet touched.

Their shelves reached to the ceiling, built even round the door to the dining-room and enclosing the row of little-paned windows that faced east. Books piled the floor in ranks, mounds, and top-heavy towers of unequal height, a maze of which the lanes between were so narrow that you could hardly move without knocking books over in a fluttering puff of dust.

Standing in the middle of this, Miles held the lamp high and slowly looked round him. 'It’s all right!' he fiercely said aloud.

And the door opened, and Fay Seton came in.

*

I do feel a little sorry for the mysterious Miss Seton, who will be doing the dusting in here! 

{weekend words}

The waiters hovered beside us, the courses came, delicious and appetizing, and the empty plates vanished as if by magic. I remember red mullet, done somehow with lemons, and a succulent golden-brown fowl bursting with truffles and flanked by tiny peas, then a froth of ice and whipped cream dashed with kirsch, and the fine smooth caress of the wine through it all. Then, finally, apricots and big black grapes, and coffee. The waiter removed the little silver filtres, and vanished, leaving us alone in our alcove. The liqueur brandy was swimming in its own fragrance in the enormous iridescent glasses, and for a moment I watched it idly, enjoying its rich smooth gleam, then I leaned back against the cushions and looked about me with the eyes of a patient who has just woken from the first long natural sleep after an anaesthetic. Where before the colours had been blurred and heightened, and the outlines undefined, proportions unstable, and sounds hollow and wavering, now the focus had shifted sharply, and drawn the bright little restaurant into sharp dramatic outline.

Mary Stewart (1954)  

Madam, Will You Talk?

{weekend words}

Francesco brought an ashtray over to the balcony table, and leant close to place it beside him, so close that Georgie could clearly smell his perfume. He wondered if it might be one of those new French colognes, and what it might be like to wear a daring cologne himself rather than just boring old toilet water.
‘I did enjoy your recital with Miss Bracely, sir,’ his valet murmured respectfully. ‘I had no idea you were such a talented pianist in addition to your painting skills.’
‘Thank you,’ Georgie replied awkwardly into Francesco’s shirt front. He found his heart was suddenly beating more quickly, doubtless as a result of his agitation.
‘Tell me, sir,’ Francesco enquired softly. ‘You are clearly such a sensitive gentleman. Do you possess any other particular ... artistic tastes?’
This at least was an easy question to answer. ‘Why, yes,’ Georgie said brightly. ‘How clever of you to guess. Actually, do you know, I’m very fond of needlepoint.’
Francesco moved away and said, ‘Indeed, sir’ as he gently closed the French window.

 Guy Fraser-Sampson 

Lucia on Holiday (2012)

{weekend words}

As it happens... we have a detailed account of the work habits of one of antiquity's more prolific scholars, the Elder Pliny. In a well-known letter (3.5), the Younger Pliny describes the solution to his uncle's (evidently unusual) desire for reading efficiency: he had a lector read to him over meals and scolded a friend who made the lector slow down to repeat a mispronounced word (11-12); when taken a bath he had a book read to him or dictated notes (14); he traveled with a secretary, who performed the same duties in any spare moments (15); to allow similar accommodation during the journey itself, he always used a litter in preference to walking (16).

William A. Johnson (2010) 

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire

An instance of the ancient audio book? I wonder if this would improve my efficiency. You can read the letter in full in English (scroll down to 3.5), rather archaic English or in Latin.

{weekend words}

The drill was to wait patiently in line until it was your turn, and then give your order clearly and succinctly. Madame was a whiz at judging the ripeness of cheese. If you asked for a Camembert, she would cock an eyebrow and ask at what time you wished to serve it: would you be eating it for lunch today, or at dinner tonight, or would you be enjoying it a few days hence? Once you had answered, she’d open several boxes, press each cheese intently with her thumbs, take a big sniff, and—voilà!—she’d hand you just the right one. I marveled at her ability to calibrate a cheese’s readiness down to the hour, and would even order cheese when I didn’t need it just to watch her in action. I never knew her to be wrong.

Julia Child (with Alex Prud'homme)  

My Life in France (2006) 

{weekend words}

That a woman should look right in the country is always very important to Englishmen; another thing to which they often attach considerable importance is legs. Richard Atherley now observed that Hetta’s legs, stuck out carelessly in front of her on the sand, though strong and shapely were rather thick, as Central European legs are apt to be; they were not in the least like Julia Probyn’s long lovely ones. And with a sort of pang of surprised emotion the young man realised that in this girl, at any rate, he could even love thick legs.

Ann Bridge (1958)  

The Portuguese Escape

{weekend words}

"What an awful affair a confinement is!", noted Charles Darwin after the birth of his first child in 1839: the event "knocked me up, almost as much as it did Emma herself."

Stephanie J. Snow (2008) 

Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: 

How Anaesthetics Changed the World

{weekend words}

Mrs. Hableton did not give him time to finish, but walking to the gate, opened it with a jerk. "Use your legs and walk in," she said, and the stranger having done so, she led the way into the house, and into a small neat sitting-room, which seemed to overflow with antimacassars, wool mats, and wax flowers. There were also a row of emu eggs on the mantelpiece, a cutlass on the wall, and a grimy line of hard-looking little books, set in a stiff row on a shelf, presumably for ornament, for their appearance in no way tempted one to read them.

Fergus Hume (1886)

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

source

{weekend words}

powells.tumblr.com via WaterstonesDeansgate via skiourophile

{weekend words} muriel spark reading week

"Oh my dear Guy, do you think these new young men read my books from charity?"

"Not from indulgence and kindness. But charity elevates the mind and governs the inward eye. If a valuable work of art is rediscovered after it has gone out of fashion, that is due to some charity in the discoverer, I believe. But I say, without a period-sense as well, no-one can appreciate your books."

Muriel Spark Memento Mori (1959)

I hope everyone's gearing up for Muriel Spark Reading Week? 

More information: Stuck in a Book or Harriet Devine's Blog 

(lovely logo from My Porch)

{weekend words}

The idea of marriage—even in its highest form, based on mutual consideration and mutual forbearance—was repugnant to her. She thought of it with a shiver of absolute repulsion. To Aubrey it was distasteful, but to her cold, reserved temperament it was a thing of horror and disgust. That women could submit to the degrading intimacy and fettered existence of married life filled her with scornful wonder. To be bound irrevocably to the will and pleasure of a man who would have the right to demand obedience in all that constituted marriage and the strength to enforce those claims revolted her.

Edith M. Hull (1919)  

The Sheik

 

{weekend words}

You see them on the bus in the morning: girls reading the newspaper, girls with lending-library novels and girls simply staring off into space. If it is not a rainy day and the bus is not crowded with strap-hangers pushing one another up the aisle you can see each face clearly. Each of them is a self-contained little mask, decorated with cosmetics, keeping its private thoughts secluded in a public vehicle. Some of these girls are going to their offices because each day is another step to the success they dream of, and others are going to work because they cannot live without the money, and some are going because that’s where they go on weekdays and they never give it another thought. They go to their typing pool or their calculating machines as to a waiting place, a limbo for single girls who are waiting for love and marriage. Perhaps the girl sitting on the bus reading her plastic-covered lending-library novel is reading of love, or perhaps she is simply looking at the page and thinking of herself.

Rona Jaffe (1958)

The Best of Everything
{REVIEW HERE}

{weekend words}

I wrote a very satirical letter to Merton, the wine merchant, who gave us the pass, and said, “Considering we had to pay for our seats, we did our best to appreciate the performance.” I thought this line rather cutting, and I asked Carrie how many p’s there were in appreciate, and she said, “One.” After I sent off the letter I looked at the dictionary and found there were two. Awfully vexed at this. 

Weedon & George Grossmith (1892)

The Diary of a Nobody 

{weekend words}

She looked for less than a second and then accelerated and drove by at sixty, trailing cold air and whirling grit and tyre whine. Reacher watched her go. A good decision, probably. Lone women shouldn’t stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.

Lee Child (2010)

Worth Dying For

{weekend words}

Baron Lamberto has the world’s greatest chamomile collection. He has chamomiles from the Alps and the Apennines, from the Pyrenees and the Caucasus, the Sierras and the Andes, and even from the high valleys of the Himalayas. Every variety of chamomile is carefully catalogued and stored on special shelves, with an index card indicating the place, year, and day it was harvested. 

“I would suggest,” said Anselmo, “a 1945 Campagna Romana.” 

“Quite so, you’re the expert.” 

One day every year, the villa opens its wrought-iron gates and hardwood portals, and tourists are invited in to see Baron Lamberto’s collections: the chamomile collection, the umbrella collection, the collection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings...

Gianni Rodari (1978)

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto

{weekend words}

She rented a two-room apartment on the top floor of a converted brownstone house in the East Fifties. She furnished it with a great deal of care. Because the two rooms were smaller than those she had occupied in her father’s home, she could not take all her possessions with her. Those that she did take, therefore, were the fruit of a thoughtful selection. She told herself she was choosing the things she liked best, the things that meant the most to her, which was true; but as she hung each picture and placed each book upon the shelf, she saw it not only through her own eyes but also through the eyes of a visitor who would some day come to her apartment, a visitor as yet unidentified except as to his sex. Every article was invested with significance, an index to her self; the furniture and the lamps and the ashtrays (modern but not modernistic), the reproduction of her favourite painting (Charles Demuth’s My Egypt; not quite realistic; its planes accentuated and enriched by the eye of the artist), the records (some of the jazz and some of the Stravinsky and Bartók, but mostly the melodic listen-in-the-dark themes of Grieg and Brahms and Rachmaninoff), and the books – especially – the books, for what better index of the personality is there? (The novels and plays, the non-fiction and verse, all chosen in proportion and representation of her tastes.) It was like the concentrated abbreviation of a Help Wanted ad. The egocentricity which motivated it was not that of the spoiled, but of the too little spoiled; the lonely. Had she been an artist she would have painted a self-portrait; instead she decorated two rooms, changing them with objects which some visitor, some day, would recognize and understand. And through that understanding he would divine all the capacities and longings she had found in herself and was unable to communicate.

Ira Levin (1953)

A Kiss Before Dying

   

{weekend words}

"Genius can write on the backs of old envelopes, but mere talent requires the very best stationery that money can buy."

Jan Struther, 'Pens, Ink and Paper', 

quoted in Valerie Grove's 1989 Introduction 

to Mrs Miniver (1939)

{weekend words}

'What do you think about when you weed?' she said to me one day, as she sat and watched me busy among the onions. 'Well, all down that row I worried about the Linnet, and all down this one I'm worrying about Bill, and for the first three rows I worried about Libya, and for the next two our shipping losses, and - ' 'Stop!' said Lady B. 'I am an old woman,' she went on, 'and nobody expects me to do more than knit, but I'd never take a knitting needle in my hand again if I couldn't read at the same time and thus occupy my thoughts.' 'I wonder if one could read and weed?' I said. 'Of course you couldn't,' said Lady B. 'But it's time you snapped out of all this gloom, Henrietta. I think you'd better enter for the Bowling Tournament.' 'But I haven't played bowls since the war began.' 'That doesn't matter. I shall enter, too,' said Lady B recklessly. 'It will be unfortunate for our partners, but good for their self-control.'

Joyce Dennys (1986 [2010])

Henrietta Sees It Through: 

More News from the Home Front

 

{weekend words}

‘Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’ Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘. . . Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly. ‘You are ignorant, boy,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘This is bad. And you are content to be ignorant, which is worse. Repeat after me, there are the living and the dead, there are day-folk and night-folk, there are ghouls and mist-walkers, there are the high hunters and the Hounds of God. Also, there are solitary types.’ ‘What are you?’ asked Bod. ‘I,’ she said sternly, ‘am Miss Lupescu.’ ‘And what’s Silas?’ She hesitated. Then she said, ‘He is a solitary type.’

Neil Gaiman (2008)  

The Graveyard Book

{weekend words}

God, how difficult he was making it! Why couldn’t he have said right out that she was a slut and he’d see her damned before he married her? Well, there was the cauldron of boiling oil; there was nothing to do but to shut one’s eyes and jump right in.

 W. Somerset Maugham (1941)

Up at the Villa