I'm up tonight adding cards to my Do It/Did It Rolodex. I just received my Bas Bleu catalog. If you're a book lover & you don't currently get this catalog, order one now!
Bas Bleu (pronounced Bah Blew) is French for blue stocking. In France, a bluestocking is a literary woman. This catalog is pure heaven for those who love to get swept away in a good book.
I'm making a list of the books I want & making cards for them to tuck behind my "Books To Read" tab in my Rolodex. My first card:
Here's the description of Kevin Brockmeier's "The Brief History of the Dead":
Most of the characters in this spellbinding novel are dead. They live in “the city,” which many inhabitants theorize is not heaven or hell, but someplace between life and whatever’s beyond. It’s generally believed that people disappear from the city when the last living person who remembers them dies. When the city’s population suddenly plummets, the residents wonder, literally, what on Earth is going on. Meanwhile (back on said Earth), wildlife specialist Laura Byrd—who many of the remaining dead people seem to have some connection to—finds herself cut off and alone in her Antarctic research station, fighting for survival.
I'm also drawn to Marjorie Hart's "Summer at Tiffany"
You'll be hard-pressed to find a more charming little book than octogenarian Marjorie Hart's memoir of the summer of 1945, when she and a friend from the University of Iowa boldly ventured to New York City to work for a few months. Writing some sixty years later, she describes how they found summer employment at Tiffany & Co. as the company's first female "pages," whose job it was to run merchandise between the sales floor and the less glamorous departments (repair, gift-wrapping). With so many young men in the service, Tiffany decided to give these two fresh-faced Midwesterner coeds a try. On salaries of $20 a week, the girls pinched every penny to pay the rent and see an occasional show. They ate at the Automat, dated servicemen on leave in New York, sipped cocktails at Sardi's, danced the occasional night away, and jubilantly crowded into Times Square on VJ Day. (It's not all sweetness and light: there were friends and family members lost in the war. Hart's description of walking into her aunt and uncle's home after the news came that they had lost their son, an Air Force pilot, will chill your heart.) Summer at Tiffany is a little gem worthy of the Tiffany name.
I'm currently obsessed with old school New York. I'm addicted to AMC's Mad Men (if you're not watching it, start NOW!), I'm soaking up everything I can about NYC from the 1940s to the 1960s. What an era!! This book sounds fascinating!
And then there's "One Special Summer" by Jackie O and her sister Lee Bouvier. Take a look at the book... You'll want to art journal your way through Europe as well! Here's the card:
I printed the descriptions of the books and glued them to the back of each individual card. That way, if I don't get to it right away, I'll remember what the heck I liked about it in the first place!
I'm off to order my books...
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