Completely to Pieces

@brittarnhild

Right in front of my desk in my Blue Studio there is a window, and, as the roof is pitched, the wall is high, and over the window I have a book shelf, made many years ago by my husband. This shelf contains some of my favorite books, and if you come here to have a look you will, among my favorites, find a book which is read completely to pieces. It is a paperback, it is old and the glue on the book´s back has dried up and the papers are loose. Common sense tells me to throw away the book, but though the pages are loose, threatening to fly their own ways. The words on the pages are still there though, and the words contain dreams. Dreams which take me around the world on butterfly wings.

The book came flying to The House in the Woods back in 2004, and since then it has been read over and over. And again and again I have taken it with me on my world wide travels - to England, to India, to Syria, to Italy, to Nepal, to Tenerife, to Madeira.....and next week I plan to take it to Turkey.

The book I am talking about is
Love Among the Butterflies, The diary of a wayward determined and passionate Victorian lady, Margaret Fountaine.

Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940) wrote and draw diaries all her life, and she collected butterflies, ten thousands of them.

After her death, according to her will, 10 mahogany display cases with 22,000 butterflies were handed over to the Castle Museum in Norwich. With the butterfly cases was also a sealed and padlocked black japanese books "some two feet long by a foot wide and a foot hight, contained in a strapped cover of heavy canvas" This box, said her will, contained manuscripts which should not be opened untill 15 April 1978.

When the date came and the box was finally opened, it tured out that the manuscripts were Margaret Fountaine´s diaries, from the first one she started at age 16, till the last one finished only a few months before she died.....

 

The rest of the story can be read in the book :-)))

Margaret´s writing might not be the best, well, at least I have heard some people say that. I LOVE it. Or is it the dream of a Victorian lady spending a life traveling the world in search of butterflies I love! Yes, I LOVE that as well.

And I will continue to read the butterfly wing pages, and bring it with me around my world.

After Turkey comes Ethiopia.......

 

Today´s photos are from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong,
from the autumn of 2012.

 

 

 

Natascha Scott-Strokes has written a book about Margaret Fountain, which in by Blue Studio bookshelf always is places side by side with Margaret´s own book.

 

And one more book is making the two others company, a rare, old book which is not on amazon:
The Butterflies on the British Isles, by Richard South, F.E.S. from 1906. Hardbound in blue leather, with several inscriptions, among them a piece of paper glued on the first page which writes:
Dame Allen´s Baoys´School Library. Presented by D. Young (1950-1955). A book with hundreds of colour illustrations of butterflies. A cheerished treasure in my House in the Woods library.

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Oh my! The world of books!
The world of reading!