McHuston Booksellers

Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

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How will you answer the call?

February 1, 2014 /

When you hear the voice from above, will you be ready with a quick reply? I’ll admit right here that – for someone rarely at a loss for words – I was rendered speechless.

I mean, the voice was so clear to me, I was startled. But then, the nature of the question caught me off-guard. Unprepared.

The voice from on-high was crystal clear. Almost ethereal in the way it carried in the darkness behind the bookstore.

Have you had your dinner? the voice wondered.

I hadn’t. But then, I didn’t want to blurt out that answer without thinking it over for a half-second. If the Angel of Death or the Grim Reaper has some kind of challenge-test at first contact, my answer might make a difference.

No, I could say without hesitation. Then hedge it a little with a followup: But I’m on my way there now. Can you check back with me later? (Mortal trickery. I’m working on it.)

Truth to tell, there just wasn’t a precedent in my experience to know what sort of a reply to offer. Standing behind the shop with my car keys in hand, fumbling around for an answer. How long could I cheat death standing in the dark gabbing? Who really knows for certain about this stuff? That question. Strange. I would have expected something along the lines of “Are your affairs in order, Mr Bookman? Are you ready for the final chapter?”

And what if the reply is something that is repeated at the Pearly Gates? Maybe an afterlife crowd gathers there to hear the off-the-cuff answers to the Great Question, sort of like Funniest Heavenly Videos with a spirited spirit audience.

The other thing was – the voice didn’t sound the way I would have expected. (Not that I have EVER expected to hear voices, you understand.) If it was Death calling by any other name, I could imagine a voice more businesslike. Maybe a little threatening. You don’t expect to wrestle for your mortal soul with someone bearing a pleasant tone.

If it was to be my final testament, my last spoken words, I decided it would be best to stick to the truth. As a point of fact, I was getting into my car to grab a drive-through burger so I could get back to the shop and wrap up the evening’s work.

Well, I replied rather quietly. I was going to run to McDonalds…

As that part slipped out my mouth, I smelled the heavenly scent of a grilled steak – obviously seasoned to perfection. (You’d expect no less under the circumstances, though. Would you?)

But, steaks in the hereafter?

I tipped my head back to better sniff the drifting aroma, and spotted the stainless steel grill gleaming brightly in the cast of the streetlight. The lid was tipped back and I could see a thin cloud of smells-great-clear-down here smoke wafting skyward.

My neighbor. On the second-story deck in back of the loft. Obviously cooking up something a little more culinary than my plans. I could imagine the red glow of the coals under those steaks. I could imagine the red glow of my embarrassed face shining up from the parking spot down below. That was no scythe in her hand. Long-handled spatula.

I was going to run to McDonalds – that much I had already spoken aloud. Time for a quick-conversational U-turn.

…nothing compared to whatever you’re cooking up there, I finished. Smells great!

Lame, sure. Best I could do when my words began as a reply to the Reaper. In fact, I take no shame in it. Much better to answer the way I did, standing in the dark hearing a disembodied voice. I mean, it was better than screaming out like a little girl. Or throwing myself to the ground and blubbering about how all those sins over the years were accidents and Lord have mercy on me now Lord have mercy on me now.

Close call, that. Pride-wise.

I’ve decided to take a lesson from the indignity of it and come up with some fitting last words, something equally literate and moving. Something that might give ol’ St. Peter cause for thought as he reads down my life ledger. Words that cut to the drama of the moment but maintain an optimism toward this worldly existence.

Aww – who am I kidding? Think I’d remember my little speech at the moment of truth?

Not a ghost of a chance.

Come visit! (but announce yourself clearly when entering…)

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!

Old days Art.

January 30, 2014 /

It is amazing to me the beautiful results that can be created with parallel lines, when it’s done by a talented person. I’m not sure exactly how the old “etching” and engraving process worked, but the images found in older books, magazines, and newspapers employed the process until technology provided a way to reproduce photographs. The parallel line technique is still employed in some of the Wall Street Journal’s pages.

Unfortunately, the advent of new technology caused quality to suffer even if the quantity of printed pictures greatly increased. Newspapers used to use a dot process they called “half-tones.” Details were tossed out with the space between the dots.

It’s a beautiful thing here at the bookstore when the lunchtime dishes are washed, giving me time to tackle the office mess (again). An organized, clean, and efficient back-office would be a great thing, I’m thinking. But my space tends to be more like some people’s garages – so full of this and that – that no room remains to park the car.

While moving this and that to here and there, I ran across a grouping of pages containing some poetry and some engravings. A little research revealed that the pages are from an 1885 issue of The Magazine of Art.

According to Wikipedia:

The Magazine of Art was an illustrated monthly British journal devoted to the visual arts, published from May 1878 to July 1904 in London and New York by Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. It included reviews of exhibitions, articles about artists and all branches of the visual arts, as well as some poetry, and was lavishly illustrated by leading engravers of the period such as William Biscombe Gardner.

The engraving I’ve included is by an artist named Jules Frederic Ballavoine, who lived from 1855 to 1901, and received his formal art training at the L’Ecole de Beaux-Arts under historical painter Isidore Alexandre Augustin Pils (1813-1875). Ballavoine exhibited widely across Europe and won medals in a number of juried exhibitions. His works are held by both museums and private collectors.

He was a young man of thirty when he finished the woman penning the note – an expressive work that doesn’t translate well to the computer age. In fact, I tried to reduce the size of the image, but the computer algorithm used to shrink a picture has trouble with the narrow parallel lines. They come out sort of drunken-looking.

So I hope whatever device you’re using will allow you to click on the image for a closer look at the style of artwork that appeared during the days of your great-great-granny. (Add as many greats as required.) The second image is an example of Ballavoine’s oil on canvas work.

In this day when a “selfie” can be snapped and posted within minutes, it is almost unimaginable the amount of work that went into sharing an image with others back in the day.

My neighbor Alisa at Your Design (in the Rose District) can frame your etchings and engravings quite beautifully, and you’ll find a section of books on art and artists here at the shop, so –

Come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!

The Do-it-Yourself Dream.

January 23, 2014 /

I can see him sitting at the kitchen table like it was yesterday – my dad with a pencil in his hand working at a piece of grid-lined graph paper. I was high school age, old enough that I realized that he was in the middle of something I had never before witnessed. I was breezin’ through the room toward the door.

What’cha doing? I wanted to know.

Well, he answered. He was designing a house. Drawing up a floor plan.

That surprised me. I glanced down at the perpendicular lines and assorted box-shapes. Huh. I was even more surprised. It sure looked like the floor plan of a house. I’d just finished 10th grade drafting, so – of course – I was an expert. On the other hand, there was no stretch of the imagination in which I could picture my dad as having association with any part of home construction. Even paperwork parts.

You see, I knew for a fact that he was a little bit “tool challenged.” I’d been in the garages of my friends, where their fathers had tool collections filled with exotic repair-paraphernalia.

Not my dad. He owned a pair of pliers. A hammer. One screwdriver of each type. He had acquired a telephone lineman’s leather belt-pouch with a wire-bender and needlenose pliars – a couple of specialty tools that have little-to-no use in the average home repair. That sparce collection was stored in a small metal box in a lower kitchen cabinet. Next to the little tin of sewing machine oil.

My dad was not a handyman.

(He did replace the light switch in the bathroom, a project of which he was so proud he actually called me in to look it over. It was crooked. I didn’t mention it. Hey. It worked, after all.)

My friends razzed me about being the son of a head-shrinker until I convinced them I had inherited certain mind-control powers that allowed this son of a psych-degree-practitioner to make them do embarrassing things in public against their will. (Okay, that last part isn’t exactly true, but they did eventually lighten up when their teasing failed to get a rise out of me. Hey. I couldn’t deny that my dad did that sort of thing. For a living.) The tools he worked with every day were those kept somewhere besides a toolbox. No skill-saws. No jackhammers, mitre-boxes, socket wrenches, hand awls, or die-punches. He worked an adjustable brain-wrench, I guess.

I asked him about the floor plan. Was he planning to build a new house?

No, he answered. It was just something he enjoyed doing. Designing plans.

At the time, I was thinking that – as a hobby – there was a spectrum of activities that might be more rewarding. I mean, even if he completed a single paint-by-number velvet Elvis (Google it), he could frame it and put it on the wall. (Not any wall in our house, I’m betting. Maybe his doctor’s office waiting room.) If he constructed little ships in bottles he could hire someone to build a mantle in our house on which to display them.

He could pretend to golf like a lot of other dads, and just drive around the course in a cart on Sunday afternoons.

No.

But, I guess building and construction in the DNA is to blame. Unfortunately, after the death of his grandfather (who built a trio of side-by-side homes in Parsons, Kansas that are still standing and looking fine) that particular part of the code pertaining to actual handiwork became a recessive gene. It still hasn’t reappeared – bless my great-grandfather’s pea-pickin’ heart.

Embarrassingly, I’ve just changed channel from the PBS show This Old House to the Do-it-Yourself (DIY) network’s Rehab Addict program. If there is such a thing as an Old Age crush, I have one on Nicole Curtis, the woman who buys derelict homes and restores them to as close as original condition as possible. Man. (Or, should I say, Woman.) She knows her stuff.

I’m not at the kitchen table drawing floor plans, but here I am watching home repair television. If anything – at least my father was producing something tangible. I’m no more actively involved in construction than a museum patron is an artist.

As a bookseller, I don’t see myself ripping up a linoleum floor to reveal a vintage hardwood underneath, just waiting for a sanding and a coat of varnish. Oh, I’ve got the tools to handle most projects – but it is a little like a stamp collector comparing himself to a postman.

There are those that do it. And those that admire the talent and job well done.

If I had only possessed the foresight to ask my dad for one of his sketched-out floor plans maybe one of my little granddaughters could build it one day. That construction-strand of the DNA is bound to reappear one of these generations.

Find a woodworking book when you Come Visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St. Broken Arrow OK!

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