Editions des Deux Coqs D'Or Beginning French Books

Editions des Deux Coqs D'Or or "Two Golden Roosters" published many adorable easy French language books before it became Hachette Livre (Paris) in 1991.  I was putting these books in my etsy shop and thought I'd share some of the adorable illustrations.  These books are second printings of books originally published between 1950 and 1960.

My sister picked up this beautiful edition of Robert Louis Stevensons' A Child's Garden of Verses at a Value Village in Saskatoon. It has no date and I can hardly find anything about the specific edition.  Illustrated by Charles Robinson, it's just divine.  Take a look:

Are you lusty for words? Come hither!

My boyfriend and I are planning to play our first game of scrabble together tonight.  So, in order to ensure my own victory, I searched for "two letter scrabble words" only to get totally distracted by a website called The Phontistery.  

According to the site's purveyor, The Phontistery is "The International House of Logorrhea (an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources".  

Holy cow, huh?  I know what you're doing tonight!

The site is pretty addictive.  So much so that I didn't study my scrabble words and now I'm going to lose.  

So what do you REALLY think?

I'm reading Blindspot:The Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald.  What are your hidden racial biases?  Take the test at Harvard's Project Implicit.   Unless, of course, you know you won't like the results...

Learning To Be White At Saskatchewan's Residential Schools

It's easy to forget about the legacy of Saskatchewan's residential schools, especially if you live, as I do, on the east side of the city.  Last weekend, however, I found a primer-type picture book at a garage sale, stamped inside with the name "St. Phillip's Residential School".  The book's insensitivity to culture needn't be pointed out, and was indeed the point.  These schools sought to eliminate the "indians", or at least make them White. 

A few pages from the reader...

St. Phillips Residential School was opened in 1899 and closed in 1965.  It was located in Kamsack, Saskatchewan.  

For more on the residential schools, I highly recommend the following websites:

• Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools 
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
• Saskatoon Public Library's Indian Residential Schools: Histories, Biographies, and our Future

Miracles Do Happen

I finished Augusten Burroughs' This is How in a matter of hours.  I know I will read it again and again.  It's a book worth owning, just to know it's there on your shelf, just in case.  

Augusten Burroughs, on miracles (from, of course, This is How):

“Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles. Because we are all, every one of us, living on a round rock that spins around and around at almost a quarter of a million miles per hour in an unthinkably vast blackness called space. There is nothing else like us for as far as our telescopic eyes can see. In a universe filled with spinning, barren rocks, frozen gas, ice, dust, and radiation, we live on a planet filled with soft, green leaves and salty oceans and honey made from bees, which themselves live within geometrically complex and perfect structures of their own architecture and creation. In our trees are birds whose songs are as complex and nuanced as Beethoven’s greatest sonatas. And despite the wild, endless spinning of our planet and its never-ending orbit around the sun–itself a star on fire–when we pour water into a glass, the water stays in the glass. All of these are miracles.”

Bookyard: An Outdoor Library/ Art Installation by Massimo Bartolini

I love the idea of a community library where people can leave a book, take a book, or just peruse the shelves.  I love public libraries, don't get me wrong, but there is something about book ownership that makes life oh so sweet. 

On that note, I just came across this outdoor library on the design blog Colossal.  It's an art installation called Bookyard designed and built by Italian artist Massimo Bartolini for the Belgian art festival TRACK: A Contemporary City Conversation.   It resides on the grounds of St Peter's Abbey Vineyard, surrounded by grape vines and old trees.  At the Bookyard, you put a donation in a drop box and become the owner of whatever book suits your fancy. 

Bookyard is a temporary installation, ending on September 16, 2012.   It serves as a fundraiser for the public libraries of Ghent and Antwerp.  It is art meeting design meeting function meeting community.  It's beautiful.  I wish I have some vacation time coming up!

Self-Help (Or Something Like That) From Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs released a new book in May 2012 and I just found out.  It's being touted as "brutally direct self-help book" on Burroughs' website and I couldn't be more excited.  There is nothing more satisfying than the openness and humanity we've come to expect from Burroughs.  Stay up all night and read it with me?

How can you resist a title like this?

 

This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.

 

Click the book to go to Amazon.com.