Caroline Gordon

The minor great (is that contradictory?) southern writers are always being revived, sometimes by friends of mine; their agrarian roots make them more appealing to me than old Yankees generally. A person descended from  Alpine peasants and mercenary Celtic soldiers can remember misty maritime coasts with nostalgia, but be impatient with the old cultural hegemony …

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Watches and London Bests

If you read newspapers or magazines with “good” demographics, you might be bemused or puzzled by the totally irrational number of advertisements for wristwatches. Odder still, NONE give you any prices, perhaps because the sticker shock will be unbelievable if you are not already informed. Suffice to say simply– five figures, getting to six pretty …

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Quote

“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain the potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” Milton, Aeropagitica (HT Teddy Moritz)

Wanderers and Nomads

I keep coming back to the old Juluka song “Digging for some words” because of its uncanny evocation of the “wanderers and nomads” who erupt from time to time to menace and destroy the accumulated wisdom of more settled societies. They have come to the gates again and again, bearing different or no ideologies but …

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Gil’s Turkey

My friend Gil Stacy is a naturalist- hunter, reader, game cook, and fine gun addict who lives in Georgia and hunts everything with zest and style. While like me not… quite a collector, he has things like a Fox or two, an uncommon ten magnum Ithaca, English boxlocks. He even likes FRENCH guns, putting himself …

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Covers

…The kind of covers you may buy a book to get. Despite my limited space I have a few. One book below was bought for its cover and illos, the Ibex story; one excellent series, published by Putnam’s in Boston in the  early years of the last century, is made up of good natural history …

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