I hit the jackpot at my cottage this summer. At the cottage in one of the cabins my grandmother built two floor to ceiling, full wall bookshelves to house the thousands of books that she and my grandfather had accumulated. Just thinking about all those books makes me drool. There is the complete Time-Life library and the complete Portfolio Society library. They have Shakespeare’s, Dickens’, Robertson Davies’, Arthur Conan Doyle’s collections. Hundred year old poetry books from Shelley to Dickenson to Coleridge to Woodsworth; two copies of every old yellow-cover Nancy Drew mystery and a huge collection of Hardy Boys, Bobbsy Twins and Trixie Beldon. Winston Churchill’s history collection; Orwell’s four volume memoirs; paper back thrillers, Sue Grafton to Michael Critchon; more Archie comics than you could fathom. There are dozens of huge photography books and the most beautiful cookbooks you could imagine. You make a time-line by their books; Russian history and photography and travel books for when my grandma accompanied the junior hockey team to Moscow sometime in the seventies; aviation books bought around the time when one of my uncles decided to become a pilot; two generations of children’s books. I’m pretty sure that they have the entire Modern Library top 100 (a list I may or may not be absolutely obsessed with) fiction books, all in different editions. It’s so glorious! 

Every year I discover new books and this year was no exception; I discovered a series of six books called “Foxfire”, guides to plain living. Not to be confused with Amish plain living this is basically a how-to for hillbillies or people aspiring to be hillbillies. 

There are entire sections that are written in dialect — not a single g to be seen in any of the present participle verbs. There are pictures of random people without explanation as to why they would have their pictures in the books (see picture 1). There are recipes and crafts (picture two; confounding) anecdotes and cures for thrush (picture three; terrifying)— even how to make your own moonshine (picture four — note the bookmark that was already marking the page — and picture five, a photo of a watering can in a creek, the high-tech system for some home-brew). Even the table of contents is pure gold (picture six). Discovering these books was like finding out the boy you like likes you, too. 

Without further ado, here are the photos I took because, really, you have to see this to believe it.