After a hot, sticky summer in the city, I’ve made it to the beach — I’ll be in Westport, MA through Labor Day, exploring the river and the marshes, the ocean, marveling at cool birds, and trying to figure out how to work my new camera.
Have a great week, everyone!
Image via Juanjo Valverde
You’ll never catch me donating my precious homegrown tomatoes to La Tomatina, a giant food fight that’s held in Buñol, Spain on the last Wednesday of every August. Still, it must be a pretty bizarre and amazing experience, and I’d certainly rather be pelted with relatively soft, ripe tomatoes than with oranges, as they throw in Ivrea during Carnival.
Raw tomato sauce, anyone?
Ah, the last, precious days of summer… Guest blogger Kate Marshall is back with a recommendation on where to enjoy them: Ocean City, Maryland.
I have to admit that I prefer Ocean City, Maryland to the Jersey beaches (aka, “the Shore”). In my defense though, it’s primarily because my family started going there when I was child, so it’s partly nostalgic—after almost 20 years of going to the other Ocean City, I consider it my second home. In fact, whenever my friends and I play the “when I win the lottery game,” my answer usually involves some variation of “buy a condo in Ocean City, Maryland and live there full-time.”
Sporting ten miles of beach and three miles of boardwalk, Ocean City is a thriving resort town in Maryland’s Worcester County (mmm, Worcester County sauce).
So I recently spent two weeks at “my” Shore and once again, it was awesome: two weeks of sitting on the beach, reading on the beach, swimming in the ocean, walking along the beach… (there is a pattern here, yes). The boardwalk is full of shops (including more Candy Kitchens than is humanely possible, so if you’re into candy, Ocean City has you covered). A variety of hotels, condos, cottages, and bed-and-breakfast homes provide plenty of options for lodgings, although my personal favorite is the Our Place at the Beach condos on Old Landing Road, with gorgeous views of the Assawoman Bay (…yes, that is it’s real name. Yes, it is). The beachfront Atlantis also gets points for resembling a tower of Jenga pieces and being on the beach.
And yes, I’m already planning next year’s vacation. Why I don’t just move to a state with a coastline, I don’t know. I’d probably save money in the long run.
At least once a week we receive an email from someone looking for a product we no longer manufacture (or France has stopped making). Sometimes we are able to refer the person to a retailer that stocks the remaining supplies of this product. But if we get enough requests, we explore whether or not we can reintroduce it. 
This email message came in earlier this week: “Bring back the Exacompta Journey Notebooks. I have been using the Spiral/Nautilus design for years and am so sad to hear that they’re going. The Rhodia webbook and Quo Vadis Habana don’t replace this. Please reconsider this decision.”
Several retailers still carry Journey Notebooks, including our good friends at Pear Tree Pens. Click here to see their Exacompta journals page.
The Journey Books started out in 2002 as “Bound Leather Notebooks.” We wanted to make an affordable, but real leather notebook. It was billed as “A field notebook…for all those who long for the trail.” The first image – “Wild Ducks” -was an original design by French artists Rafbet Garcia and Caroline Pruih in the old Japanese tradition of wood-block carving for printing. We added a leather closure with instructions on how to tie a “lark’s head” and other knots. Finally, I had my son, who was a student then at the High Mountain Institute in Colorado, prepare his special trail mix recipe. We put all of this on a storycard in the back.
The notebooks came in two sizes – 6 1/4 x 9 1/4″ and 4 x 6 7/8″. They were made with 90g Clairefontaine paper, 96 sheets and ruled. The ruled lines were narrow to give people more space to write per page. With sewn binding and elegant round corners, they were a sturdy, quality product. We didn’t shrink wrap them, because we wanted people to be able to feel the paper.
In the next years we added several more designs and changed features. The leather tie was dropped, and in its place we added a black elastic.
The new designs included the Nautilus Spiral, Celtic Knot, Little Tiki Guy, Meon Circle, and Inuksuk. We also had a plain cover for corporate sales and people who prefered a plain cover. The image for the Inuksuk was based on a photo of an inuksuk my family built out in our woods in Pennsylvania. Inuksusks–stone men–were constructed by the Inuit as landmarks, but also, I heard, as a substitute for people so travelers never felt alone in the vast wildness.. And that’s how we felt about our Inuksuk–he was a friendly presence for us in the forest.
Several years into the product life, we changed the name to “Journey Books.” More and more, people were using notebooks as diaries for personal growth and reflections and spiritual work. But alas, there were many excellent notebooks on the market including Moleskine, Graphic Image, Field Notes, Miquelrius, and of course, our own Rhodia and Clairefontaine products.
Journey Books were quietly retired around 2008.
Ever since, we receive requests for them. Should we reconsider? I would appreciate your thoughts.
It’s hotter’n hell in New York, but before the heat wave struck Sunday, I went for a holiday hike near the Monksville Reservoir in Ringwood, New Jersey.
First, we saw a wild turkey running hard in the opposite direction. Then we saw a pile of dung on the trail. Finally, we spotted this beautiful black bear eating blueberries from a nearby patch. She (or he, not that I could tell the difference) didn’t seem to mind being photographed, so I took a couple shots to document the experience.
Afterwards, we even managed to pick a few berries for ourselves… at a safe distance, of course.
With all our recent talk of writing boxes and file boxes, I thought I’d share this photograph I took on a recent trip to Philip Johnson’s Glass House… Sitting on his immaculate, leather-topped desk (designed by Mies van der Rohe, we were told) was this pretty wooden box; apparently, it was something he’d owned since his childhood in Ohio:
The Glass House served as Johnson’s weekend retreat — during the week, he lived in an apartment above New York’s Museum of Modern Art — and according to our tour guide, when he arrived, he would empty the contents of his pockets into the box so as not to lose track of anything.
Bloomsday is a commemoration observed annually on June 16th in Dublin and elsewhere to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel, Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. The name “Bloomsday” derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses. 
The novel recounts the hour-by-hour events of one day in Dublin–June 16, 1904. Dubliner Leopold Bloom wends his way through the urban landscape, the odyssey of a modern-day Ulysses.
The special significance of June 16, 1904 was on that day Joyce had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barancle, a 20-year-old chambermaid. They walked to the Dublin urban village of Ringsend.
Davy Byrne’s Pub on 21 Duke Street was made famous in the novel. Leopold Bloom stopped there for a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy wine.
Within hours of landing in Dublin two years ago, a group of us trooped off to Davy Byrne’s Pub. Since it was early in the morning the pub was still closed–they were sweeping ,vacuuming and polishing the bar–but the owner invited us inside and gave us a tour of the pub and some good stories about Joyce. We later went back for lunch. Our group was split between Guinness and burgundy wine!
This year illustrator Robert Berry is releasing Ulysses Seen, is a comic book adaptation of the novel. The first chapter can be seen at http://ulyssesseen.com with an accompanying readers’ guide, and as a free app for the iPad.
The idea, born on a prior Bloomsday, was fueled, Mr. Berry explained, “by a few pints of Guiness and a bet.”
Has anyone followed in the steps of Leopold Bloom? Participating in a Bloomsday event?
From calligraphy artist Lorna Mulligan comes word of a new exhibit in Montreal’s Ame-Art gallery called Fibres, poils, cailloux. Featuring pieces by Mulligan and other members of the Les Calmars group, it’s on display through June 20.
For those of you who can’t make it to the show, we’re lucky enough to have pictures of two pieces that are on display (both are by Lorna). The first, Beaudelaire, started with small landscape segments done in J. Herbin’s Lie de Thé and Bleu Myosotis. After that, Lorna added the text from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal in black ink with a pointed pen and brush.
The second piece includes an image transfer of an old map of Montreal that shows Lorna’s neighborhood beside the park. Beside this she created a moody background with a mix of earthy inks (Ambre de Birmanie, Lie de Thé, and Vert Olive). The words talk about different ways of walking: And so I must be going… sauntering, wandering, meandering, and so on.
See more of Lorna’s artwork on her website.
Vienna is still filled with small, specialty shops, and one of things I remember best about living here is just how long you can spend running errands — getting coffee from the coffee store, veggies from the market, bread from the bakery, and so on. There are supermarkets, of course, but you can’t even count on finding light bulbs in them; for that it’s best to head to the electrical appliances store. There are stores that sell gloves and umbrellas. Stores that sell scissors and knives. It’s not very time-efficient, but it does help you appreciate the craft that goes into these everyday products.
And it’s a stationery addict’s paradise, because there are also plenty of stores that specialize in writing supplies, and the proprietors are always happy to give you advice and chat about this or that item. The store in the picture above is called Mastnak, and it’s something of a local chain; the slogan means “We are paper.” This one is located near my old apartment in the 7th district, and it’s got three floors that are filled with pens, paper, notebooks, art supplies, office supplies, and more.
Here’s a smaller, more upscale store in the city center, founded in 1838:
And here, not 4 doors away from it, is a newer one!
Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t resist making a few purchases, which I’ll blog about in the next few days.
I didn’t have time to take any pictures in France, but at the moment I’m settled in Vienna — where I lived 9 years ago, and where I’m back to visit friends and hang out — and I’m doing a much better job of whipping out my little point-and-shoot whenever I’m inspired.
The city, as my mother once remarked, looks like the top of a wedding cake; the buildings are big and baroque and there are lots of random statues of illustrious men on horses. Which is fine, and impressive, but after a while all those marble pillars and delicate gilded carvings start to look the same to my eye. I prefer to seek out the few remaining traces of medieval Vienna, like the ivy covered Ruprechtskirche, which is one of the earliest churches ever built in the city and is of refreshingly humble stature, both inside and out.
It’s not like medieval architecture can’t be frilly, bombastic, or repetitive, but isn’t this just lovely, with the stones and the vines and the moss growing over the statue?
