Cornflower Books

Matching your books

    "When you've finished tidying your books, step back and take a good look at your bookshelves. What kind of words leap out at you from the titles on their spines? [...]

    The energy of book titles and the words inside them are very powerful. In Japan we say that 'words make our reality'. The words we see and with which we come into contact tend to bring about events of the same nature. In that sense, you will become the person who matches the books you have kept. What kind of books would you want in your bookcase to reflect the kind of person you aspire to be? If you choose which books to keep on that basis, you may find that the course of events in your life changes dramatically."

    Food for thought there from Marie Kondo's Spark Joy.

Pricey little books

 

    Freddie Mercury's Beatrix Potter collection, sold this afternoon at Sotheby's for £19,050.

Winter scents

    'Scent always seems particularly intense to me in winter. The smell of toasted crumpet on a frosty morning. The sap from a branch, snapped in the garden, or of lemon zest grated in the kitchen, all seem especially vivid, heightened at this time of year. The cold air seems to illuminate scent ... Some things actually smell cold. Snow, obviously, but also peppermint, cucumber, yoghurt, ginger and juniper.'

    Nigel Slater, The Christmas Chronicles, quoted by Isabel Bannerman in The Star-Nosed Mole: An Anthology of Scented Garden Writing.

    More winter scent here.

This and that

    I hope you can access these if you don't take the paper, but yesterday's Financial Times had a couple of interesting book-related articles: Erica Wagner on the (Man) Booker Prize, and Edwin Heathcote's piece Tome Management which includes the good line, "Books are the structure of the life of the mind."

    Meanwhile here's Tracy Chevalier on titles, (and her forthcoming novel sounds very promising indeed).

This weekend I 'ave been mostly ...

... clearing books.

    It was time to tackle the study: pretty much all fifty feet of shelving there was double-stacked and there were piles on the floor; everything was dusty. Now all is clean, clear, and calm! 150 books have gone to charity, 100 to another room, and the rest have been reorganised. There are still many hundreds elsewhere in the house to be sorted but we'll leave those for another day.

Well done, Father Christmas!

    The delights I found under the tree yesterday.

                                    ~~~~~

    Thanks to all who gave Santa a prompt; (you know me well!).