We didn't prune the crape myrtle this weekend. It was snowy on Saturday and on Sunday it was just too damn cold. Instead of lying around the house, we drove up to Fredericksburg to browse in the antique shops and visit our favorite (my favorite, anyway) used book store.
I had this idea that I wanted a new glass for drinking whiskey out of. I have a nice crystal tumbler, but I'd like to have another with a different pattern. Well, they don't have those kind of glasses at the antique stores, we found. Decanters and cordial sets, lots of china teacups, depression glass, all that girly-foo-foo stuff, but no crystal tumblers. I guess people don't part with those. I did find one set of Czech crystal tumblers, but the pattern didn't do anything for me.
Also, I found an adorable glass candy dish shaped like a rabbit in a basket, but I didn't get it because I have no place for tchotchkes. Another discovery was some neat Chinese, Japanese, and Korean items, now that one of the places in the big antiques mall has an Asian source. They had bean cake molds, baskets, apothecary cabinets, and these iron crosses with Buddhas on. We didn't buy any of those things either.
We bought books!
We went to the bookstore first thing. We haven't been up to Fredericksburg in a few years, what with engineering school preempting fun little daytrips, and we were surprised to find that Riverby Books had taken over the whole building at 805 Caroline Street. The first floor had formerly been occupied by a gift shop which sold smelly candles. In the past, we always held our breath and ran through the gift shop up the stairs to the bookstore. This time we walked in and saw books! And smelled books!
I found a scholarly work on netsuke which Oz decided didn't have enough pictures for him. For me, I found Charles II, The Weaker Vessel, and The English Revolution 1600-1660 (to which someone had taken a hole punch, but only through the margin). For me, Oz found Artificial Intelligence (2nd edition), a textbook on the edge of which the original owner had neatly lettered his name and phone number, but which otherwise showed no evidence of having ever been opened. He also found a boxed 1968 Heritage Press edition of A Journal of the Plague Year. This book has a leaflet from the publisher about the special features of this edition, including how the cover looks like burlap to reflect the winding sheets of the plague dead (conveniently overlooking how at the height of the epidemic the dead were flung into mass graves without any such wrappings) (But a cover that looks like dirt wouldn't be very appealing).
I'd better get reading.
469 words | February 20, 2006 12:31 PM | Real true story