Zora Neale Hurston & The Power of Books

Inspired by books and stories, Zora Neale Hurston eventually found a way to stretch her limbs:

“In that box were Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but they did. I seemed to remember seeing Thor swing his mighty short-handled hammer as he spread across the sky in rumbling thunder, lightning flashing from the tread of his steeds and the wheels of his chariot….That held majesty for me….

In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and early adolescence. My soul was with the gods and my body in the village. People just would not act like gods. Stew beef, fried fat-back and morning grits were no ambrosia from Valhalla. Raking back yards and carrying out chamber pots were not the tasks of Thor. I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle.”

Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Zora Neale Hurston.

Next Week — Chet Raymo & the Roots of Wonder

Read Full Post »

Mean Poets and Calm Cattle

“If you got to talking to most cowboys, they’d admit they write ‘em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.” — Ross Knox

In 1908, a local rancher walked into the Estancia, New Mexico newspaper office, and inquired about printing a small book of cowboy songs he had been working on. For almost twenty years, Jack Thorp gathered cowboy ballads and poems from across the west. The finished volume was printed for just six cents a copy, and was the first book exclusively devoted to cowboy songs. Not only that, but Thorp is recognized as the first person to preserve the ballads sung by ranchers to calm cattle on the range. Western historian Mark Gardner has written a wonderful essay to accompany this new edition of Jack Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys, which includes a CD selection from the songs Thorp has kept alive.

also pictured above: Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas, a Library of Congress CD, featuring field recordings made by John A. Lomax.

And, to put a Western twist on National Poetry Month, here’s a few more books & CD’s from the Land Library’s Western Folklore collection:

Elko! A Cowboy Gathering (a CD from the 20th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada), Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry, edited by David Stanley & Elaine Thatcher, Cowboy Poetry Classics (a CD of a Smithsonian Folkways recording)

Cowboy Poetry: The Reunion, edited by Virginia Bennett, Home on the Range: John A. Lomax & his Cowboy Songs by Deborah Hopkinson & S.D. Schindler (from our Waterton Canyon Kids Library), Graining the Mare: The Poetry of Ranch Women, edited by Teresa Jordan

Read Full Post »

Heart-Pine Russia

“Russia’s geography is rich in forest, and it’s culture is abundant in the spirits and heroes that traverse it. The national literature has ventured deep into these woods, but Western critics have only rarely followed. Costlow’s marvelous book stands in the middle of this forest and points to wonders all around. This is a beautiful, meditative, and insightful book that opens up new worlds of appreciation for both literature and nature.” — William Nickell on Jane T. Costlow’s Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest

Russia has more woodlands than any country in the world, and its forests have loomed large in Russian folklore, culture, and history. Russan forests have long been the focus of naturalist wonder, scientific scrutiny, and poetic imagination. For some the forest was the imaginary landscape of their religious homeland, for others it was the locus of peasant culture and local knowledge. In Heart-Pine Russia, Jane Costlow explores the central place the forest has held in the Russian imagination.

Costlow considers the work of authors such as Turgenev and Tolstoy, and artists like Shishkin, Repin, and Nesterov. One of our favorite chapters focuses on Dmitrii Kaigorodov, a forester and natural historian who was a John Burroughs-like figure offering popular works in the end of the Imperial era. (His most famous book was titled Chats about the Russian Forest — the Land Library’s latest book we would love to find!).

Author John Randolph has this to say about Heart-Pine Russia: “The struggle to really see and hear the life of Russia’s forests infuses Costlow’s story with many lyrical moments…” The Land Library is thrilled to find a book with so many fresh insights into another culture’s natural history traditions. Jane Costlow’s book joins several more on our shelves:

One of the first Russian natural history books we ever read: Nature’s Diary by Mikhail Prishvin (the Penguin edition includes an appreciation from John Updike), and a former Land Series book, The Storks’ Nest: Life and Love in the Russian Countryside, Laura Williams’ wonderful memoir of moving from Colorado to live and work in the Russian outback, eventually marrying international nature photographer Igor Shpilenok.

The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky’s sensitively drawn portrait of native people in the modern world, and Dersu the Trapper, V.K. Arseniev’s (1872-1930) description of three expeditions to the Ussurian taiga (along the Sea of Japan) and his classic encounters with the solitary aboriginal hunter named Dersu. It’s amazing how many current-day nature writers have been influenced by Arseniev’s book!

The Tiger: A True Story of Revenge and Survival — one of the most popular books the Land Library Book Club has ever read. Covering the same landscape as Dersu the Trapper, John Vaillant tells the tale of the mighty Amur tiger, and the hard life of the Russian outback. A wonderful writer! As is, Ian Frazier. His Travels in Siberia describes the land, the people, and the dark chapters of Russia’s Siberian experience.

“Who are we when we enter the forest? What happens to our personalities, our languages, our histories, our narratives? The essays in this book explore a tradition of writing and envisioning Russia’s great European forest — diminished and vulnerable, but lovely and powerful and in many ways daunting to those who entered it…” Jane T. Costlow, in Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest

Read Full Post »

The City Alive

The New York Times just reported some truly exciting and unexpected news. The New Yorker‘s next issue will feature a new essay by the legendary author Joseph Mitchell. The newly discovered “Street Life” is the first published work by Mitchell since 1964.

Joseph Mitchell, who died in 1996, was the great wandering and listening soul of New York City. True, you won’t find any of his titles at local Nature Centers, but his sketches of the urban scene shows us a writer immersed in his home landscape. From Fulton Fish Market to McSorley’s Saloon, Joseph Mitchell observed his given plot of land keenly and compassionately, like the ideal naturalist that he was. Back in 1992, his work, long out of print, was resurrected in a wonderful anthology, Up in the Old Hotel.

There are too many to choose from, but here’s one of our favorite passages from that collection:

The Rivermen, from Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor

I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running — a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide — and I like to look at it when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls as long as a half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream.

The success of Up in the Old Hotel led many publishers to reprint Mitchell’s earlier books:

My Ears Are Bent, a collection of Joseph Mitchell’s earliest (pre-New Yorker) pieces, mostly from the 1930′s. Old Mr. Flood, a slim volume centered on the comings and goings of Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market.

And two of his all-time classic collections: The Bottom of the Harbor, and McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.

The Rocky Mountain Land Library will always have these books on our shelves, for the simple fact that Joseph Mitchell is one of the greatest writers of people and place that we know!

In the last few days, New Yorker editor David Remnick commented on the exciting find of new writings from Mitchell’s pen: “What’s so poignant about [the excerpts] is the sadness of the incompletion but the brilliance of the voice. There’s an ambition in the voice; the voice is becoming more Joycean. He’s looking outward, but all of these pieces are very interior. He’s at the center of it.“

“When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.” the opening passage of the classic Mr. Hunter’s Grave, from The Bottom of the Harbor.

Read Full Post »

Brilliant!

We’re excited! Once again, through the kind donation of a very thoughtful Land Library supporter, we have just received a fresh batch of brilliant British nature books. It’s like walking into your local bookstore with every book brand new to your eyes.

Here’s one of our favorites: Patrick Barkham’s The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals (pictured above). In the grand tradition of a birder’s Big Year, Barkham sets out over the course of a single summer to discover how many British butterflies he can see. Along the way, he paints a vivid portrait of the admirable and eccentric butterfly collectors of the past, not to mention those he meets on the road. Margaret Drabble loved this book, commenting that “readers will be astonished by details of the teeming natural world that we so blindly inhabit.”

Another unique addition to the Land Library’s shelves is also pictured above, Nature Tales: Encounters with Britain’s Wildlife, edited by Michael Allen & Sonya Patel Ellis. This thoughtful anthology gathers together most of Britain’s leading writers and naturalists. Here’s just a few: Charles Darwin, Charles Waterton, Colin Tudge, Dorothy Wordsworth, Edward A. Armstrong, Edward Grey, Henry Williamson, J.A. Baker, John Clare, Kathleen Jamie, Mark Cocker, Miriam Rothschild, Richard Jefferies, Richard Mabey, Robert Mcfarlane, Roger Deakin, William Cobbett, R.M. Lockley — and that’s just a partial list. A wonderful collection!

And rounding out our latest brilliant box of British Books are these one-of-a-kind volumes:

Men and the Fields by Adrian Bell (the author traveled through East Anglia before modern agriculture altered the landscape forever. Ronald Blythe has called Bell’s book “among the best rural literature of the 20th century.”), The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre by Madeleine Bunting (what a wonderful place-based book — the multi-faceted story of a one-acre plot on the Yorkshire Moors), The Lie of the Land: An Under-the-Field Guide to the British Isles by Ian Vince (Vince brings to life a prehistoric Britain with red desert sands, molten rivers of lava, and great tectonic collisions).

The Nature of Scotland: Landscape, Wildlife and People by Magnus Magnusson & Graham White (a terrific primer & full of color photos), Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt (the Land Library is lucky enough to have several books on the U.S. Geological Survey’s work & explorations — now, here’s a book that tells a similar story of painstaking progress and adventure, this time on the British Isles), The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (a beautifully written look at the misty mountain environment of the Cairngorms. Jim Perrin, writing in The Guardian, had this high praise, describing The Living Mountain as “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain.”).

A Year in the Woods by Chris Elford (the day-to-day adventures & sensitive observations of a forest ranger on the Dorset/Wiltshire border, At the Water’s Edge: A Personal Quest for Wildness by John Lister-Kaye (for thirty years John Lister-Kaye has taken the same circular walk from his home in the Scottish Highlands. His walk, and this book, describes the constant evolution of one of Britain’s best-known naturalists. Lister-Kaye is also the founder of the world-renowned Aigas Field Centre).

For more on Britain’s vast literature on the land, be sure to check out a few of our earlier posts!

–A Brilliant Box Of British Books: The New Naturalists

–A Brilliant Box of British Bird Books

–A Brilliant Box of British Bee Books

–Nuts for Huts

–Assume the Stillness of a Tree

Read Full Post »

With Your Head in the Clouds

Clouds connect people to the wonders and workings of nature, whether you are in Manhattan on a beautiful spring day, or on the Great Plains as the weather suddenly shifts. But the trick is, you have to look up, you need to have a healthy degree of cloud awareness. And that is why we so admire the life’s work of Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society, and the author of The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds, and his latest book, The Cloud Collector’s Handbook.

Throughout both books (and no doubt throughout his daily life) Gavin Pretor-Pinney can’t help but have fun. He describes The Cloud Appreciation Society as a global organization that fights “blue-sky thinking” wherever they find it.

Pretor-Pinney’s books are overflowing with wonderful photos and illustrations. Along the way, you’ll quickly realize that you are learning the clouds from the most entertaining teacher you’ve ever had. But there’s poetry as well. Here is the grand Manifesto of The Cloud Appreciation Society (wacky and incredibly sane at the same time):

–We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

–We think that clouds are nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

–We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.

–We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.

–We believe that clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul…

And so, we say to all who’ll listen: Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds.

Over the years it has been excruciatingly hard for the Land Library to pass by any good book on clouds. It’s as simple as that, and the reason why we have so many fun books, such as these:

another “visual manifesto” from Gavin Pretor-Pinney: Hot Pink Flying Saucers and Other Clouds from The Cloud Appreciation Society, and Richard Hamblyn’s Extraordinary Clouds: Skies of the Unexpected from the Beautiful to the Bizarre.

The Book of Clouds by John A. Day, and For Spacious Skies: A Sketchbook of American Weather by Eric Sloane.

Richard Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, a fascinating biography of Luke Howard, the London chemist who gave the world the three basic cloud family names: cirrus, cumulus, and stratus.

and, from our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library, here’s another biography of Luke Howard, The Man Who Named the Clouds by Julie Hanna, Joan Holub, and Paige Billin-Frye, along with a terrific cloud awareness guide for kids: Shapes in the Sky: A Book About Clouds by Josepha Sherman & Omarr Wesley.

Kelvin-Helmholtz Cloud over Jervis Bay, Australia, photo by Giselle Golog.

As many of you know, the Land Library is based in Denver, Colorado. Occasionally (and once at our bus stop) we have spotted a dramatic white wave breaking across the Front Range. With those fond memories, we were especially excited to read these words from Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s The Cloud Collector’s Handbook:

“Looking just like enormous waves breaking on the shore, it is rare, fleeting and the favorite of cloudspotting surfers. A well-defined Kelvin-Helmholtz is a crown jewel in many a cloud collection, for it requires the cloudspotter to be blessed with eagle-eyed sky awareness and sheer blind luck.“

The Land Library loves its continued blind luck, and we hope you give yourself a treat and visit The Cloud Appreciation Society’s website for much, much more — including an amazing photo gallery. Click here for terrific photos of Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds!

Read Full Post »

North America’s Sea of Grass

The Great Plains are a vast expanse of grasslands, stretching from Texas north to Canada. Here are two invaluable reference books that form the heart & soul of the Land Library’s prairie collection.

Recently published, the Atlas of the Great Plains (by Stephen J. Lavin, Fred M. Shelley, & J. Clark Archer) includes over three hundred original full-color maps, accompanied by the authors’ insightful commentary. This atlas explores all aspects of our great North American grasslands, including Native American history, modern settlement patterns, ecological regions, agricultural trends, and much more.

Published in 2004, the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains(edited by David J. Wishart) has already risen to the level of a classic reference work. This thick tome contains over 1,300 entries stretched over 940 pages, with illustrations and photographs throughout.

Both books point to the rich natural and cultural history of the Plains. Clearly, North America’s midcontinent is much, much more than flyover country!

Scanning our new arrival shelf of prairie books, we were struck by how many titles found their inspiration from the flowing grasslands of the Canadian Prairie. Books such as these:

Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds by Trevor Herriot, River in a Dry Land: A Prairie Passage (an earlier book by Trevor Herriot, and the winner of the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award), and Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir from poet Lorna Crozier — full of landscape, family, and stories centered around Crozier’s childhood in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.

And here’s two older books, both born north of the border:

Prairie: A Natural History by Canadian naturalist Candace Savage, and Wallace Stegner’s classic childhood memoir Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (an absolute favorite of the Land Library’s Book Club!).

Last year, the Land Library published a series of posts on the prairie. Here’s a quick look:

–Prairie Voices: Red Cloud and Beyond

–The People of the Prairie

–The Natural History of the Plains

Read Full Post »

When the Earth was Young

“Rock painting was our species’ first artistic adventures, our first celebration of the natural world, maybe our first crucial step into reflective self-consciousness. Tony Hopkins’ extraordinary artistic project, to witness this art from the chalk-hills of England to the shaman caves of South Africa, and then paint the paintings himself, gives a uniquely sympathetic insight into this first flowering of the human imagination.” — Richard Mabey.

For over twenty years, British artist Tony Hopkins has traveled in pursuit of the globe’s most remarkable rock art sites. The result is one of the most intriguing books we’ve seen this year — Pecked and Painted: Rock Art, from Long Meg to Giant Wallaroo, a wonderfully rich volume full of the author’s photographs, field sketches, finished paintings, and extensive journal entries. Hopkins truly went far and wide in his rock art quest: Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Australia, South Africa, Namibia, Sudan, Egypt, and the American Southwest. No two sites were the same, but as Tony Hopkins describes, something universal shone through:

“Whatever its meaning when the earth was young, rock art speaks to us now of a time when people lived their lives close to nature, in tune with the rhythm of the earth. It is no coincidence that most rock art is associated with what we think of today as wilderness areas, the far reaches of temporal and spiritual existence, wild landscapes where the past is still visible in the present, where what is most special has to do with the way we respond to nature.“

Hopkins’ words perfectly describe why the Land Library has built a 20 year collection of books devoted to prehistoric art. Starting with North America, and volumes such as these:

The Serpent and the Sacred Fire: Fertility Images in Southwest Rock Art by Dennis Slifer, Plains Indian Rock Art by James D. Keyser & Michael A. Klassen , Legacy on Stone: Rock Art of the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners Region by Sally J. Cole.

But before long, those universal themes mentioned above, led us to seek out volumes such as these:

Rock Art of the Dreamtime by Josephine Flood, The Hunter’s Vision: The Prehistoric Art of Zimbabwe by Peter Garlake, The Archaeology of Rock-Art edited by Christopher Chippindale and Paul Tacon.

along with Jean Clottes’ classic and comprehensive World Rock Art:

Read Full Post »

The City: Humanity’s Greatest Invention?

In the past few years there has been several books that highlight the often-neglected green qualities of cities. The logic of these books is hard to dismiss. More than two-thirds of Americans live on 3% of land that we describe as urban, a clustering of the human population that preserves even more open space. Also, city dwellers, on average, use 40% less energy than suburbanites.

Edward Glaeser has written the latest such challenge to any easy thoughts we’ve ever had about urban living: Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richar, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Glaeser, a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, argues that our success as a country, and as a species, depends of the health and wealth of cities. Triumph of the City is an extremely important and thought-provoking book, no matter where you live. Edward Glaeser is familiar with the pitfalls of history, as we teeter between urban squalor and urban splendor, yet he still shares this hopeful vision:

“If the future is going to be greener, then it must be more urban. Dense cities offer a means of living that involves less driving and smaller homes to heat and cool. Maybe someday we’ll be able to drive and cool our homes with almost no carbon emissions, but until then, there is nothing greener than blacktop. For the sake of humanity and our planet, cities are — and must be — the wave of the future.”

And, if the urban future is to be bright, it needs to shine at the neighborhood level, and that’s why we especially love Jay Walljasper’s book The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking (pictured above) — a volume full of practical solutions for the continued revitalization of the urban landscape.

You all know that the Land Library has thousands of volumes on rural lands, farms & ranches, along with the wilderness reaches of the Rockies, Africa, Tibet, and beyond. But, for a multitude of reasons, we have a strong affection for our books on city life. Here’s a few more titles we can easily recommend!

Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood by Peter Medoff & Holly Sklar, City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village by David Sucher

And two classic books that opened the eyes of a new generation to the special places that truly makes a neighborhood: The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, and Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities (both by Ray Oldenburg).

For more on the life of the City here’s two of our favorite past posts:

–On gaining the tools for fun urban explorations.

–Joseph Mitchell, the great wandering soul of New York City!

And here’s a link to all our past City Lives posts — enjoy!

Read Full Post »

Fleece, Fiber, and Good Stories Too

“Natural fibers are part of our culture, our heritage. They have a living breathing animal (or a growing plant) behind them. They often have small-scale farmers or indigenous communities behind them, too — people and cultures whose livelihoods and historic identities can be supported by their continuing work with these fibers.” — from The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook

OK, it’s official — we love this book! The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook: More Than 200 Fibers from Animal to Spun Yarn, by Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius, is a wonderful blend of history, craft and science. Robson & Ekarius span the globe in their quest for natural fibers — and the stories behind them. Among the more than 200 animals described are sheep, goats, alpacas, llamas, vicunas, camels, bison, musk oxen, yaks, and more. Each featured breed is accompanied by up-close photos of their fleece, fiber & yarn, along with helpful tips on dyeing, fiber preparation, and spinning and weaving particulars.

Deborah Robson & Carol Ekarius had this to say about their uniquely valuable book: “…our goal is to look at animal fibers in a way that hasn’t been done before. We are looking in more depth…at the animals that have provided handspinners, knitters and weavers with the foundation of their craft and artistry for thousands of years. You won’t find patterns in this book, but we hope you will learn a great deal about the wool and hair fibers that have clothed and served us for generation upon generation, back to the first person who picked a fluff of wild sheep fibers out of a bush and twisted them together.“

You’ll learn so much, with each page you turn!

A Winter Transformed: “Musk oxen grow several types of fiber, one of which is the animal’s famous underdown, also known as qiviut of qiviuq (as well as a few other spellings). Qiviut deserves its legendary status. This rare fiber has not been readily available for spinning or in yarn form until recently, but now qiviut is making its way into our consciousness (ooh!) and then, if we’re lucky, into our hands (aaah!)….Qiviut’s exceptional combination of fineness, softness, lightness, and warmth make it a delight to work with and wear….About half an ounce of qiviut in the form of a neck warmer — a tiny amount! — transformed our experience of winter.” — from The Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook

As many of you know, the future home of the Land Library will be at a historic ranch, set in the high mountain grasslands of South Park, Colorado. Buffalo Peaks Ranch has a rich history, including a tradition of sheep ranching. Recently, the Land Library received an extremely thoughtful donation of a fully-equipped weaving studio, which will allow us to hold workshops on a craft strongly in tune with the heritage of South Park. And, of course, we’ll have lots of books to call on for inspiration and advice — books such as these!

The Natural Knitter: How to Choose, Use, and Knit Natural Fibers from Alpaca to Yak by Barbara Albright, and Sheer Spirit: Ten Fiber Farms, Twenty Patterns, and Miles of Yarn by Joan Tapper, with fun & perceptive profiles of farms & ranches from Maine to Oregon.

And, here’s one of our all-time favorite volumes among our books on sheep!

Henry Moore’s Sheep Sketchbook: In 1972, when the packing and crating for a major exhibition made it impossible for Henry Moore to work in his sculpture studio, he retreated to a small shed that looked out on a sheep meadow. Over the course of several months, Moore captured the scene out his window, and upon completion of his Sheep Sketchbook, it was presented as a gift to the artist’s daughter, Mary.

For more on sheep, natural fibers, and a very fun film clip of sheepdogs in action, be sure to check out our earlier posts!

–Wild Fibers Stitching Us Together

–So Focused, So Intent (The Meeker Sheepdog Trials!)

Read Full Post »