Bethlehem, PA

I was brought up in a home which loved books. There was a “bijou” illustrated life of Christ measuring under one inch square, the compact Oxford English Dictionary complete with magnifying glass to read the reduced type, sets of Kipling, Saki, O. Henry, Bret Harte, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Federalist Papers, Bellonii’s De Aquatilibus (engravings of fish from 1553), Stormonth’s Dictionary, Johnson’s Dictionary in four volumes, Antique Views of Boston, The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, The Flowering of New England; Biographies of Washington, Thomas a Becket, Hamilton; Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, several biographies of Burr. A book with a heavily gilded face, which, when one bowed the book block, revealed a watercolor scene painted on the edge of the pages. There were Bibles – the ancestral family Bible kept in a box under the bookcase, recorded with family births and deaths dating to the 17th century, to which my father added each of our names when we came into this world. Matthew Carey’s Bible printed in Philadelphia in 1806. There was a book printed by Benjamin Franklin, and books which once belonged to John Jay, my great-great-great-great-grandfather. There was the new hymnal (1980), and the old hymnal (1940), the new prayerbook (1953), the old prayer book (1928), and the old-old prayerbook (1896?). There were books of poetry by Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost, and Alan Seeger. Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People, biographies of Henry the Eighth and Richard the Lionhearted, 1066 and All That, St. Paul’s School in the Second World War.

There were prints and paintings too- Currier and Ive’s Fearnaught Stallions, portraits of my ancestors: William Weymann , A Calder Print- Mobiles – My father’s wire sculpture of a dinosaur featuring his extracted molar as the mouth – his wood sculpted Steotopygia – Algernon, the half-naked life-sized Moor with ivory teeth who collected keys and cards by the front door– samplers in Italian from 1823, engravings of Matthew and David Clarkson – Stuart’s portrait of James - a letter from John Marshall- a piece of the flag of the Kearsage – A small Dutch painting of an angry child near the dinner table, Ackerman prints of the Star Chamber and the fire of London, an abstract Carnival in Rio- a profile of William M Evarts.