Books on the Menu

Colours

@brittarnhild

I dream in colours. For most of my life I have believed that everyone does, until a  friend told me that all her dreams were in black and white. I have always loved colours, loved their purity, loved their mix.

When I was in 4th grade I wanted to knit a pair of socks. This was a real challenge as my classmates were still struggling with potholders. I had learned to knit by my mother and my two grandmothers, and already knew a lot more than knit & purl. In the class room there were baskets filled with yarn, and I picked out a dark blue and an olive green. When I went to the teacher to show her my choice, I couldn´t believe my ears when she told me I could not knit with those two colours. "blue and green do not go together"

I don´t remember which colour my socks ended up in, but I know that from that day on blue and green together are my favorites! Can you imagine anything more beautiful than a deep blue sky and a green river, green fields and green and blue mountains?

In High School I was knitting my father a sweather. Grey, with white and pink stripes. A girl told me - why, you can´t use these colours for your father! Pink is not for men!

My father loved the sweather!

Some time in 2003 I was in Stavanger for a work meeting. In a small Narvesen (kind of 7eleven) a book caught my interest:

Colour. Travel Through the Paintbox
by Victoria Finlay

I picked up the book, started to read, and since then I have been reading it!
Not because it is a slow read, but because I am reading it over and over all the time.

Last spring I met the author, and now my book has a writing in black ink on one of its first pages:
Dear Britt Arnhild.
For someone who loves colours as much as I do!
Victoria Finlay, Bath  

Looks like Victoria knows me. Yes, I love colours. And when I wrote my book about Lent and Lental traditions a few years ago, the rainbow and a colour calendar were important elements.

Victoria´s book is now on Folio,
but for some reason I am not able to find a seller who will skip it to Norway :-(((
How I would love to have the folio edition on my coffee table.

But I do have my paperback from 2003, which I will continue to read on and on.

 

 

From the back cover of the book:

Colour tells the remarkable story of Victoria Finlay´s quest to uncover the many secrets hidden inside the paintbox. On her travels she visited remote Central American villages where women still wear skirts dyed with the purple tears of sea snails; learned how George Washington obsessed about his green dining room while he should have been busy with matters of state, and investigated the mystery of Indian Yellow paint, said to have been made from the urine of Indian cows force-fed with mango leaves.
From mascara to violin varnish, from nomadic carpets to stained glass to pillar boxes to crayons, the story of colour is the story of the efforts of artists and artisans to reproduce the rainbow - and the impact their work has had on the world.

 

 

After Colours Victoria Finlay has written another book; Jewels.
I love this one almost as much as Colours.

 

I met Victoria earlier this summer. She had the most lovely necklace in black and silver. When I commented on it she told me; this is jet.

and since I´ve read Jewels I knew exactly what jet is :-)

 

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today´s pictures are from Tenerife

and you can read about my remarcable meeting with Victoria Finlay here

Travel Writing

@brittarnhild

Another travel is coming up, this time a week in Istanbul. I am leaving on the first plane Saturday morning, via Amsterdam, so I don´t need to start filling my black suitcase with the orange ribbons untill tomorrow. Tonight I am preparing my travel journal.

After trying out many different types of travel journals, I have ended up with black moleskins, the best ones, with the paper actually meant for water colours.

I plan to write more about my travel journals in tomorrow´s BrittArnhild´s House in the Woods, so I must not get carried away. This post is meant to be about a few books which I find helpful, inspirational, in my own travel writing process.

As this blog unfolds, you will get to know hundreds of travel books, some of them I read again, and again all the time, others have been read once and now cherished behind glass in my special bookcases for travel writing, others are still wiaiting to be read.

But let me come to the point.......I´ve had a long day at work today, and when I came home we had the "tree felling drama.....", so I am a bit tired :-)

The two books on travel writing and travel photography I am reading/studying for the moment are:

 

Lonely Planet´s Travel Writing, actually a gift from Jane and Lanny, blog readers who live in California, Jane and Lanny write the most remarcable travel letters themselves when they travel, which the do alot, and email them to family and friends, we are lucky to be on the list.

 

And Lonely Planet´s Guide to Travel Photography

 

 

Photos, from my travels around the world:
1 - aqua alta on St.Mark´s square, Venice, Italy
2 - Alhambra in Granada, Spain 
3 - Tenerife, Spain
4 - Yosemite, California, USA
5 - glass artist Mauro, Venice, Italy 
6 - Visitor at Hotel La Fenice, Venice, Italy (one of my favorite travel photos)
7 - blogging friend in Vienna, Austria 

 

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!

 
 

 

The Far Traveler, Voyages of a Viking Woman

@brittarnhild

I don´t plan this to be a daily blog, though I have enough books that inspire to post daily for a lifetime :-) It might be weekly posts, may be more often, may be less. But now in the beginning I am so excited to have this blog started, I can´t help another blog post already today.

And the book on the menu today is the one I have on my night stand for the moment, The Far Traveler, Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown.

I found the book in a bookstore in Reykjavik, Iceland in April, and knew it would be the perfect book for me.

Not an ordinary travel book, like those by Dervla Murphy, Freya Stark or Frances Mayes, where the traveler tells her own story, this one is about Gudrid, an Icelandic woman, a Viking woman, who lived and traveled about 500 years before Columbus. Gudrid is mentioned several times in the Icelandic Sagas, and the author has made it her goal to find out as much as possible about the remarcable woman.

 

One way of doing this is to travel to Iceland "joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid´s steps on land and in the sagas" (from the back cover of the book)

I have only read a bit more than 50 pages yet, of 264, and I am hooked. The biggest problem though is that I am so dead tired when I go to bed, I only manage a few pages and then I am fast asleep.

The good thing is:
the book will last me a long time :-)

 

 

Unfortunately amazon.co.uk wouldn´t let me link to the page of the book though a picture, but try clicking on this link instead. 

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The pictures are of me exploring the Waterfalls at Seljaland, on South Iceland