My fantasy bookstore

It's been painful to read so much recently about the "end of printed books." Presumably, people are reading more digital words than printed. A related discussion concerns the end of reading. In other words, people are viewing and not reading words. I'm reminded of other information outlets that have been given the death knell and continued on. Remember radio? I still listen - on-line. At its very essence the act of reading will evolve, albeit in other forms and, perhaps, it's silly that we're even having this discussion.

Related to this is the slow disappearance of physical bookstores, at least in the U.S., from many communities. I wonder if bookstores will need exist as a cooperative of complementary destinations. Perhaps . . . and, so, my fantasy bookstore . . .

The building is home to several entities including bookstore, restaurant, performance space, park, playground and possibly, garden nursery.

On the first floor, coffee and simple meals are sold or served (some design consideration would need to be given to the obvious problem of mixing food and books). The first floor is ringed by bookshelves and reading tables and, at its center, a large seating area for eating and meeting. This center space rises two stories to a skylight or skylights. Powered louvers are opened and closed from a switch below. In the evening, the first floor center space is a dance floor or performance stage. Like the first floor, bookshelves line the walls of the second floor. This floor is actually a wide catwalk with seating for reading and "people watching."

Outside the building, a slightly elevated porch with seating rings part of the exterior. On one side, patrons enjoy the view of an outdoor garden from a porch or sit at tables within the garden itself. Perhaps the garden could also be a low-scale nursery selling small plants and garden supplies. On the other side of the building, parents watch their children in the playground from the porch. A third side offers a small outdoor performance space. The fourth side, would be parking and entrance.

So, it wouldn't be a bookstore that simply sold books, but, rather a place for a number of different activities that could also support the sale of books.

What is your fantasy bookstore?

House call

When you've hurt your finger, perhaps it's best to just cut if off!

Platinum Garden Prints

Beth Dow's garden prints

via gardenhistorygirl

Catawampus?

From World Wide Words . . . [Q] From Ian McAloon in the UK; Patricia P Miller asked a related question: “I have heard an American friend of mine use the phrase kitty corner to describe things that are diagonally opposed, as for example: ‘The drugstore is kitty corner to the ice-cream parlor’. Have you heard this phrase before and do you have any clue as to its origin?”

[A] It’s certainly a very odd-looking phrase. It has lots of variant forms, such as catercorner, kitty-cornered, cata-cornered, and cater-cornered, a sure sign that it puzzles users.

The first part comes from the French word quatre, four. It’s actually quite an old expression that first appeared in English as the name for the four in dice, soon Anglicised to cater. The standard placement of the four dots at the corners of a square almost certainly introduced the idea of diagonals. From this came a verb cater, to place something diagonally opposite another or to move diagonally, which can be found in the sixteenth century. Some English dialects had it as an adverb in compounds such as caterways or caterwise. By the early years of the nineteenth century it was beginning to be recorded in the USA in the compound form of cater-cornered. It had by then lost any link with the French word; people invented spellings in attempts to make sense of it, often thinking it had something to do with cats, which is why we have forms like kitty-corner.

That wonderful word catawampus is often used in the central and southern parts of the USA to mean the same thing, though it can also refer to something that’s askew, crooked, out of shape, or out of joint. The first part of it comes from the same source, though the second half is mysterious. It has been suggested its source is the Scots dialect verb wampish, to brandish, flourish or wave about. However, catawampus can also refer to something ferocious, impressive or remarkable. It may be this is an entirely separate sense, deriving from catamount for the mountain lion or cougar.

Hammock Daze

Yesterday we had hail. Today it's supposed to rain. Last week the temperatures hit the 80's. Nuts, let's just hit the hammock.

Words

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours." Salman Rushdie

Cousins!

Barettes

The interloper

We went to the L.A. Zoo for a field trip this week. At the prairie dog compound, we discovered an interloper. The fat prairie dog resident didn't seem to mind, though.

The polar bear returned every night

Awwww. When bear meets husky.