Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I'm still recovering from reading the William Targ book - such verve and urbanity has me feeling like a country mouse - oh, wait, I am a country mouse! And I love it! But that doesn't mean I don't like peeking into worlds other than my own. For example, while googling around to see what Targ was up to during the twenty-five years he lived after publishing his memoir, I found this great page of candid photographs by Bill Yoscary, who took the pictures at Gotham Book Mart events. There are several in there of Roslyn and Bill Targ and lots of schmoozing authors and artists and book people, such as Joe Brainard, Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, Lawrence Durrell, Andy Warhol and some Superstars, and Frances Steloff. Sure would like to hear what they were all talking about.

Thankfully I can divine some of the talk from the books these people left in their wakes. I've been slowly unpacking the remaining boxes of my shop stuff, and came across a perennial favorite of mine, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Harcourt 1977). I bought this book at the Museum of Modern Art gift shop when I saw the Warhol retrospective there in 1989, when I thought I was a city mouse and, as an art student, when Warhol was my hero. Reading through it, you know, it is still a great little memoir, the artist in his own words. Same vintage as the Targ memoir, same gossipy smart city-insider flavor. Books books books, I can't get enough of them!

I have been putting them aside from time to time, though, and as this blog has been image-free for too long (and in the spirit of this oddly-early spring) here are a few pictures I took two days ago around "the farm," as we affectionately call our slightly-less-than-an-acre of land. The crocuses by the stone wall are now fully open and very cheerful:

When I removed dead leaves from the herb bed, I found the thyme sending out greenery:

And even the chives are getting into the act - I'll be able to clip some soon, for an omelette. I ate one and it was very tender and fresh and sweetly oniony, the taste of pure green:

The little round bed on the side of the lawn has another thyme shrub getting green, and some daffodil shoots are coming up, too, at the back of it:

And finally, since we Mainers always try to stay one step ahead of the weather, here's the backyard woodpile, all ready for next winter. When we bought wood last year we bought twice as much as we needed, so this pile has an extra year to get really good and dry. Around here, this says security, more than anything:

In the Warhol book, he says, "I'm a city boy. In the big cities they've set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don't have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick." (p.154) I love going away, but whenever I am away, I can't wait to get back home, back to the coast of Maine, back to the farm.