This Week's Reads

For the gentle reader hoping for insights to an obscure new novel, check in another time.  The Dilettante is all about picture books this week (as he is most others).

After all the brouhaha that's been going about, including Christopher Petkanas' mean-ish piece in the New York Times (I'm not going to bother link to it, you've all read it), I'm reading Duane Hampton's ode to her late husband, Mark Hampton, An American Decorator (Rizzoli).  And yes, I know I'm late to this party.  I waited for the local library to get it.   I've always been neutral about Mark Hampton---some of his work I like very much, some I find lacking or derivative .  I barely dare say it out loud, because his fans are a loyal lot who, having crowned their God, will not brook any criticism.  Sarah Palin fans are wimps by comparison. Therefore, I am relieved to say that I like the book far better than I expected to.  Mrs. Hampton writes intelligently and lovingly, even objectively ,about her husband's work, and the best is very good indeed---and that is mostly what she has chosen here.

Susan & Carter Burden's first New York apartment, from Mark Hampton.  I like this.  How could I not with that art? (For a post about Carter Burden's uncle's house in Maine, click here)

I'm alternating Mark Hampton with Peabody & Stearns:  Country Houses & Seaside Cottages by Annie Robinson (W.W. Norton).   This book is way overdue, a serious history of the firm that was probably second only to McKim Mead & White in importance in the late 19th and early 20th century.  They were also among the major innovators in what we now call the shingle style, and that development is fully covered here.   The printing is beautiful and crisp with wonderfully reproduced vintage photos supplemented with modern material (take note Acanthus Press, publisher of seriously over-inked illustrations).  My only criticism is that the designer is guilty of one of the Dilettante's biggest annoyances in book design----the dread split gutter illustration.  What looks great on a flat layout rarely works as well once it's on the open pages of a tightly bound book, splitting the image in two and destroying the impact.  But a small quibble.  I'm enjoying the book enormously, and gasp, am even learning a few things.

K

Kragsyde, Manchester-by-the-Sea Massachussets, one of Peabody & Stearns most famous houses.  Many lesser known, but no less wonderful designs are featured in this book

I'm putting both aside now----I'm going to read Claudia Pierpont's The Dignity of Duke Ellington, next up  in this week's New Yorker, and if I'm still awake after, the May issue of World of Interiors is calling me---there's a seriously delicious library in a house in Kensington, and Jorge Pardo's house has me ready to sell up and move to Mexico.  

When I'm through with Hampton and Peabody and Stearns and Ellington, I'm hoping to have in hand the new Beatrix Farrand, Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, by Judith Tankard.  Although Farrand has been excellently covered in a couple of earlier books, this one has the largest format, and draws more heavily on the Farrand archives at Berkeley, as well as the Garden Club of America's amazing lanterns slide collection at the Smithsonian, resulting in much excellent material. I've flipped through it at the local bookstore, and it is gorgeous.  Farrand summered nearby in Bar Harbor, and designed many of the finest landscapes in this region ( a couple of which I will be posting about in weeks to come, now that garden season is here).   The vintage color photograph of the lost Satterlee garden at Great Head in Bar Harbor, a subtle masterpiece of site appropriate design, very different from the grand gardens she is most famous for, is alone worth the price of this book for me.  Another must-own is the collection of Farrand's own writings in The Bulletins of Reef Point Gardens, reprinted several years ago with a new introduction by Paula Dietz.  (Ms. Dietz once kindly wrote a couple of paragraphs about the Dilettante in the New York Times.  Many, many years ago.   I still fondly remember the fact checking department ringing me up before publication, to ask if I was still indeed 36, or had I turned 37?  That's a newspaper with a passion for accuracy.  And for those who care, I am long since past 37.  Way past.)

That's it.  No big intellectual revelations here.  But, if some of my choices this week interest you, let me urge you to think about ordering them from your local independent bookseller, and not from Amazon just so you can save that $10.00 that you'd only waste on something else anyway (unless you're really really really better than most of us).   Amazon is all good and well, but when the independents are gone, something will truly be lost.  One of my favorite commentators told me the other day about a Noel Coward record  he was seeking that was misfiled at Amazon under Christmas (Noel).   I prefer a world where people who know and love the material shelve it, read it, listen to it, recommend it.

And if you aren't lucky enough to have an independent bookseller anymore, I'd be glad to recommend our local bookstore--they couldn't be better.

Way Down East: The Two Windswepts

There are two Windswepts.  One is a best selling 1953 novel by Mary Ellen Chase, about a several generations of a family living in a remote house by the sea in Down East Maine.  The other is her summer home, a remote house by the sea in Down East Maine.

Born in Blue Hill in 1887, Chase is considered one of the heirs to the literary tradition of Sarah Orne Jewett, and indeed is one of the best of the Maine novelists.  She puchased Windswept, located near the end of the world between wild blueberry barrens and the ocean on Petit Manan Point at Steuben, Maine in 1940, and there wrote nine of her books.  Built in the 1920's, the simple cottage is classic Maine, low, shingled, with simple shutters, and many small paned windows to let in the light from the sea.  A big living room with fieldstone fireplace anchors two wings, one with kitchen, the other with bedrooms, forming a sheltered courtyard at the entrance.

When Windswept was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the nomination read: 

She is considered by many literary critiques to be second only to Sarah Orne Jewett in her ability to capture the history and particular atmosphere of the coast of Maine and its people.  The isolated cottage provided Ms. Chase with the tranquility and isolation she needed to write, and in turn it also provided the inspiration for the setting of ‘Windswept’ (1941), her best-selling novel about immigration and integration in old settled Maine communities.”

“It is to the credit of the property owners since Ms. Chase that much of her former possessions, including furniture and books, and all the solitary ambiance of Windswept has been retained and preserved since her departure.”

Driftwood on mantel at Windswept 

Chase had to give up Windswept in 1956.  It went through several owners, who cherished the connection,  and the simple aesthetic of the place, before going on the market a couple of years ago.  The new owners did not desire any of Chase's furnishings or mementos, and last week, there was an auction, sparsely attended, and the accumulations of seventy years were sold, including a handwritten notebook about the house, written by Chase for the new owners when she sold the house.  It was a sad reflection of Chase's fallen literary status that even this manuscript failed to excite spirited bidding.  This writer, whose great-grandmother was a friend of Chase's,  purchased a round chair table, probably destined to be my new kitchen table,  and the piece of driftwood from above the living room mantel, where Chase's nephew remembered that she loved to always have a fire going in all weathers, for the pleasant scent.

 Windswept sold for 1.2 million, with 7.5 acres and 1100 feet of shorefront bordered by a preserve.  Imagine the same property in Montauk....

(Below), the final page of Chase's Windswept journal, wishing the new owners the same happiness she had experienced there.

 

Green Thoughts

As Maine winters go, this one is so far fairly mild (sorry, Florida). Never the less, the snow on the ground and ice underfoot begin to take a psychic toll by the middle of January.   I am impatiently waiting for bulbs planted indoors to flower, and my thoughts turn increasingly to gardens. 

I am too busy during the summer season to garden in any real way; my only claim to fame the huge pale pink geraniums in front of my store.  In sad truth, most of my once lovely gardens are now just a memory---but a man can dream.  I've pulled a stack of garden books from the shelf, and am flipping through them, daydreaming---Francis Cabot's A Greater Perfection, about his brilliant garden in Quebec, Vita Sackville-West's Garden Book, with its aristocratic musings about plant combinations, Fletcher Steele's Garden's and People, wishing for the 109th time that by the mere act of reading this book, some of his brilliant design skills will magically rub off on me; Katherine (Mrs. E.B.) White's Onward & Upward in the Garden, a collection of her elegant essays from the New Yorker, Beatrix Farrand's Reef Point Bulletins, the best writings going about native plants and landscape, and last, but not least, Eleanor Perenyi's Green Thoughts, which sent me looking for these clippings of her garden in Stonington, Connecticut.

I won't waste your time and my space writing an essay about Perenyi---her New York Times obituary  says it very well.  If you have never read Green Thoughts, you must.  I am just now deep in her defense of dahlias, and it is thrilling.

Her garden was admirable for its taste, and for its restraint.  In this current era, where everyone is busily creating little formal gardens that reach the pitch of hysteria in their attempts to be charming and whimsical and artistic, here we have the real article.  Tailored to its site, a plot around an 18th century house in Stonington, CT, it is slightly under maintained and under designed, and very close to perfect.  Old fashioned plant varieties, unspoiled by eager hybridizers, are massed to create architecture and effect. This garden is the one that would look so well around my own little white house...when I've cleared the steeplebush and alders....someday....

Photographs by Emerick Bronson, published in House Beautiful, November, 1981

Complaint Department: Annoying Book Designs, and The Troubles They Cause

This post by Blue Remembered Hills engendered an excellent discussion about book design a few weeks ago.  Today, I have a pet peeve to add to the list:

Having finished disposing of the usual Christmas trash, I am now moving about 700 books from one location to another in the house.  It is mostly a pleasurable task, coming across old favorites, appreciating the design of others, to say nothing of floor space freed up in the tiny sittng room that the books are leaving. .  There is however, a tiny blot on that happiness, and I am going voice another book design peeve to add to the list:  Books that are longer than they are high, particularly if they are published only in papercover.   It may be a lovely design conceit, especially if one is featuring very horizontal images, but most would be as well served if they were in a regular vertical format.  Why do they peeve me?  The coffee table books thus designed cannot be shelved in a regular depth shelf.  Nor, for that matter can some of the smaller ones (half folio and smaller).  The paperback volumse inevitably fan or warp open on the edge while shelved.  I've tried everything over the years---laying them flat (they still curl and warp), shelving them together, even if it puts them out of category (see laying flat) putting them between larger volumes (there's still always an inch that fans out), weighting them down with something ornamental (it doesn't really serve a book well to have a terra cotta architectural ornament resting on it), and the most drastic solution, giving them to the library book sale.  Additionally, the exposed edges get dirty (yes, the shelves do get dusted).   Wonderful custom slipcases would be the answer, but damn those taxes and new roofs.

A few of the offenders, favorites all.

Oh, and pet peeve #3:  I have quite a few paperback monographs, some without titles on the spine.  Give me a break.  It wouldn't take that much more ink.  Then I could locate them on the shelf easily. Duh.

There, that's off my chest.  Back to sorting books.

Hope you all had a happy holiday.  I did.  Good company, good food, good drink----the first two almost to happy excess, the latter in sensible moderation.

Thank-you, JCB

My thanks to JCB  for asking me to submit a 'five favorites' list to her book week posts .  It was quite a mental exercise to narrow the broad field of regional Maine books down to a list of five.  I am still swooning at the company I found myself in during book week --- giants of the blogosphere.

And, thank you also, Janet for the kind announcement of my new blog to your readers.  I feel as giddy as a debutante.

A Little About the Past and How I Happen to Find Myself Starting This Blog

Preamble:  This is not going to be an autobiographical  'this is where I ate today' sort of blog----I have other fish to fry---but by way of introduction, a little background seems in order.  Although the following makes me sound ancient and cocooned (he said defensively), I'm in fact only in my fifties (again defensively), and tend to mostly live in the moment.  That said........

I grew up in a classic Maine village, of a type that now exists mostly in postcard memory---you know the sort---romantic, remote, with white steeples, rocky harbor, elm trees shading the Federal & Greek Revival houses lining the streets.  My childhood was soon enough after the great depression and WWII that we were still in something of a time warp, with unpaved side streets, old wooden bridges crossing a former mill stream, abandoned farms with the obligatory lilacs growing next to cellar holes.  The village was insular, with elderly widows and spinster daughters, last vestiges of a Sarah Orne Jewett world, many of them my relatives, inhabiting the old houses.  They worshiped at either the Congregational or the Baptist Churches, sewed for good causes, baked pies, did their wash on Mondays, hanging it outside to dry.  In that pre-feminist world, one heard talk of woman's work and woman's place, but in reality, anything the men could do, the women did too---farming, hunting, repairing the shed, drive the truck, repair the truck.  Oh, and there was gossip to fill long winters.  Much of it revolved around how everyone was related, with people who had died before the civil war still discussed as if they'd just left the room.  At the local schools, some teachers were still graduates of the vanished State Normal Schools, and taught classical curriculum.  The king of school sports was basketball (6'1" by 15, I had no talent for the game, to the dismay of my shorter, more jock-ish schoolmates).  The men worked hard at hard jobs, mostly seasonal---caretaking for summer residents, carpentry, fishing, subsistence farming.  My great great grandfather was lost off the Grand Banks in the early 1880's, a few weeks before my great grandmother, his daughter was born.  All her life she cherished a little crudely carved shelf that he made on the boat, as do I now.  Manners were uniformly genteel and old fashioned, faces and bodies weather worn.  Lest this sound too Ethan Frome by-the-sea, there is far more to the story, and the mix and the extremes made our village a fascinating place to grow up.

Main Street, 1870's

Culture was important.--the village library was first founded in 1796.  During the Depression, a kind and forceful woman in the village saw to it that our share of WPA money made it to town, and a handsome new building, ever since the center of the community, was built. Today the library rates as one of the to libraries in its class in the country, presided over by a succession of talented directors.  A small and varied summer colony had sprung up beginning in the 1880s, bringing with it music, art, wealth, and a glimpse of a bigger world.  In the same town where one could see smoke curling from the chimney of an unpainted farmhouse in Winter, one could also in summer spy world famous musicians rehearsing, a famous writer or five, the chairman of Standard Oil, heirs to a few Name Brand fortunes, and relatively indigent, dignified college professors.  Sleek sailboats mingled with the lobster boats in the harbor, and large shingled cottages along the shore complemented the tidy architecture of the village.

The Library, 1950's

Against this background, my interests were formed---a love of architecture from the handsome examples all around me; a fascination with interiors born at my great-grandmother's house, where time had stopped before WWI, its seldom used parlor all curios and faded wallpaper and it's kitchen with iron cook stove and sink with hand pump, so much more fun than the modern plumbing at home.  A love of nature and landscape was inherited from my mother, her own intense love of the natural world forged in her childhood exploring the woods and shore around her home.  Finally, a sense of history and heritage from my father,  his history professor brother, and their delightful parents, and of course, from living in a community where the past was always palpable.  A career selling books, and then beautiful things to people who like the same, has led to interesting and enduring friendships and exposure in the design world.

A typical house in the village, built 1830, photograph 1880's

While much looks the same on the surface, the 21st century has caught up.  We're discovered.  Lattes abound, Radicchio salad, in a fashionable restaurant is as easily, perhaps more easily, found as a baked bean supper.  People from away have settled in droves, prosperity, television, and the internet have brought us in line with the 21st century.  The side streets are paved, good thing given the crushing traffic of summer tourists.  The thrill of crossing a wooden bridge and seeing through the cracks to the rushing stream below is just memory.

My parents were (are) curious and interested about many things, and there were many road trips in my childhood to see anything and everything---rare plants growing in bogs, abandoned Federal houses on remote peninsulas, country auctions, art museums, ancient villages, egret's nests, a stretch of wild coast.  It was a visual feast, and remains so, and I hope this blog passes along some of that discovery and delight to an interested reader or two.

If you've read this far, please stay tuned.  After today, there will be few words about me, and more about things interesting and beautiful, with a New England bias showing----and pictures, lots of pictures.