So one thing that I really cherished about my grandmother and visiting her was her book collection. I've always been a bookworm, so as far back as I can remember my visits would include long afternoons alone in the the sitting room looking at beautiful old books - poetry, history, novels, and vintage books on etiquette, speech, and interior decorating!
When I was up there in May, I got to pick out some of her books to take home with me, to become part of my own library. Among the gems: Emerson's Essays, signed by my great-grandfather in 1894 in New York City; Tennyson's Poems (1925), leather-bound and signed by my grandmother's high school friend Alice who gave the book to her as a graduation present in 1928 in Jamaica, NY. Alice went on to become an M.D. at the Presbyterian hospital in NYC (cool!); an illustrated edition of Longfellow's Evangeline, with a suede cover - appears to be a first edition (no date); a 1926 edition of Moby Dick; a copy of Hard Times by Dickens; Thoughts for Every-Day Living by Dr. Maltbie Babcock (1901); Mark Twain's Roughing It and Mark Twain in Eruption. There is also a huge book of collected British and American poems, and 'Popular Home Decorating' circa 1940s which I rescued from the attic bedroom. I am so fortunate to have these treasures...when I leaf through them the smell of the dusty yellowed pages takes me back to her house on the ranch and the memories of those long quiet afternoons.
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