Bibliolatree, 2 Norwich Road, East Haddam, CT (2026)

02/26/2024

After Jonah and Ahab, where might one go? To see Leviathan with a look not riveted in fear, but rather composed of curiosity and compassion?
The baby Grey Whale Lynne Cox met one day while training as a long distance swimmer (for which she is unsurpassed), is the subject of Grayson (2006), a story that brings the looming course of our world and its oceans to focus in the rescue of a lost calf.
Twenty-five years before Cox swam with Grayson, the poet Robert Siegel made a splash with Whalesong, a fable that takes the reader under the waves and into the lives of the ocean mammals. Siegel hit notes a poet can hear and make into melody, telling the story of Hruna the Humpback whale, his odyssey in the depths to adulthood, and the salvation of the pod. In 1981 it sparked an interest in the social lives of these beautiful creatures, and began an interest in Siegel’s depiction of the Humpbacks that saw several sequels to this work.
Both of these are 1st editions signed by their authors- (a swimmer and a poet)- on their respective and respectful title pages.

02/24/2024

When roaming the emerald wood do you keep your eyes up? When you see the splash and flash of the birds, do you see them as paragons of style? As designers of their own line?
Here is Charles Harper’s Birds & Words in a 1974 first edition, signed by Harper on the half-title page, that brings a flurry of 51 silkscreen print designs whose intent is to capture the essence of each bird in the barest and sparest sense of their style.
Harper enjoyed a long career depicting birds and many other wild lives, and designing a popular poster series for the National Park Service. His birds have verve. And that to spare. And that’s amore.

02/17/2024

So you’ve really never been HERE before? Well it is a kick, Richard McGuire’s 2014 high concept history of one view of the world, from the same exact spot, over millions of years. Stories loop and abound back into, and out of, the exact same view at the same location, and are combined in multiple views overlaid in their exactly position- like memories coalesced together by the art of a new perspective. And that’s amore.

02/15/2024

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” Thornton Wilder’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning second novel was a meditation told as a study of the persons who fell to their deaths in 1714 from an ancient Incan bridge, and their acts of life and relative piety, in an attempt to understand the will of God.
John Hersey spoke of its structure influencing his Hiroshima, that focused on the immediate effects of an atomic blast on the lives of a surgeon, a seamstress, a minister, a clerk, and a priest. Just as they were met with an inexplicable fall.
This 1928 edition, already in its 9th printing, was inscribed by Wilder on the title page.

02/14/2024

Paul Gallico was as varied and successful a popular writer as any in the second half of the 20th century.
The Snow Goose, Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, Scruffy, The Poseidon Adventure, The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun- as well as sporting bios, long form travel pieces, and more. But Mr. Gallico made a sure place in his works for kangaroos, geese, Barbary apes, cats, and other beings not ordinarily given some say.
In The Silent Meow, Gallico lets a cat speak; about living with people and guessing at their irregularities, the pleasures of play, attitudes, place, errors, travel and manners, producing this work “in translation,” from a typescript prepared by a feline using a pen name. Enter one Suzanne Szasz, her husband Ray, and Cica (Hungarian for kitten). Szasz was by then in the middle of a career as a photographer that was every bit as substantial as Gallico’s as a writer. She published more than 15 books concentrating on observations of children, their faculties and growth, and family dynamics, proving influential to the study of children, and in the field of psychology, providing material images that allowed observation at close range, without the complications of interference. The 200 or so photos provided with Gallico’s text were taken of Cica by Szasz, using her quiet eye to show her kitten living life as a cat.
The result stands here, The Silent Meow, a testimony for the cat taken from the cat’s point of view, meant to give you pause. And that’s amore.

02/06/2024

Actually, my daughter’s 1939 edition of Thurber’s The Last Flower. When it was included in a 1957 collection of Thurber’s pieces called Alarms & Diversions, the octavo layout there created eight angry rows of soldiers goose-stepping across two facing pages. Thurber sketched-out the entire thing one night, a few days after the N**i invasion of Poland, and by the inkend had a fair copy to show his friends and Harpers, who rushed to get it into print as Europe darkened and despaired.
And Thurber wanted it out, seen, and read. He dedicated the book to his daughter Rosemary, and especially bristled when he thought Harpers coasted through the promotional business of it, hurting its broader distribution.
Seeing it promoted (remember, it’s a comic) for 100 advance sales against popular novels on their 27th edition and 250,000th copy- he wrote to E.B. and Katherine White- was like ‘saying “Fifty People Jam Carnegie Hall to Hear Gluck”’
He thought it should be sold on its truth.
The “Parable in Pictures” begins with the ending of one world war and moves on inexorably to the next, with the only promise held in a single flower. So admired was this book by teachers, and parents, and promoters of peace, that when Thurber died in 1961 his obituary, written by E.B. White, closed with praise of this work, and the image of that last flower.
And that’s amore.

02/03/2024

Frankly, it wouldn’t seem right to present one without the other. A Bright Shining Lie was written by Army veteran Neil Sheehan, in seven “books,” that develop a three dimensional backdrop for a bird’s eye look at the US war in Vietnam. It was awarded the 1988 National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1989. It was Sheehan and his wife Susan Sheehan (nee Sachsel), a staff writer for The New Yorker when they met, who copied the Pentagon Papers and delivered them to be edited, and later published by The New York Times. Susan Sheehan had beat her husband to the party in 1983 when articles that she first wrote and published for The New Yorker were published as Is There No Place On Earth For Me? Perhaps one of the most admired books of reporting from that period, the book is an exacting combination of several of the crafts of reporting and writing being executed at the expert level. Sheehan made it into the internal dungeon that is the infernal suffering room of psychotic episodes and schizophrenia; the relentless, poor pouring out in near ceaseless monologue, captured verbatim, that she got down on the page, also the first widely distributed presentation of the word salad that speaks as witness to the excruciating suffering borne by the subject. And Sheehan was on the ward, and in the rooms, for 2yrs. at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, standing by a patient she called Sylvia Frumkin, telling her heartbreaking story within the greater diaspora of institution and asylum populations, and describing the netherworld there that was swallowing patients more often than not.
She also wrote a three-part New Yorker piece in 1986 that I admire. It described in maximum detail, (at perhaps the ultimate peak of editor William Shawn’s expansions), the discovery of a WWII B-24 Liberator long lost on a mountainside in Papau New Guinea, and the process there of recovering the remains of the dead.
The copy of A Bright Shining Lie was inscribed by Sheehan on the day the Pulitzer was announced in its favor, to NYTimes Gardening Editor Joan Faust.

01/19/2024

Tipping her hand perhaps- (but more like putting her thumb on the scales)- Bascove (Anne), had more to say about books and wit, passion, sensuality, bridges, and humor than could be expressed illustrating covers for the works of others. So she published these anthologies and included original paintings to season to her taste.
And that is one rich and deeply felt banquet.
Each pictured here is a 1st edition signed by the artist on the title page.

01/18/2024

In June it will be six years since this man’s untimely death, but his effect and impact on his field has remained. If you had read this book when this copy- a second printing of the first edition- came out in 2000, one could easily tell by your pleasure in pointing out that one ought not order fish off the menu on Monday. So many inside stories and secrets came out it seemed that suddenly a private company had gone public.
And a certain stripe was awarded the New York cook, and cooks everywhere behind the line- (who were creatures of a different stripe already) when Bourdain gave credence to their efforts, ordeals and pains, so long looked past and relegated to a stale role.
Here, as so often in those early days, Bourdain gave his NYC cheer to cooks in his inscription to Dee. “COOKS RULE!”
And that’s amore.

01/16/2024

At last !
Let it snow, c’mon.
Let it transform the view
To a vision from my youth
When dreams swept into drifts
Of what-in-the-world might happen next.

01/07/2024

Novelist, editor, essayist, and commentator Jean Dutourd first had to survive occupation and capture in WWII France; but he did escape, and returned to become a leading figure in the French Resistance. For 60 yrs. thereafter he wrote novels, non-fiction (The Best Butter!), and essays that saw him decorated for his literary output as well.
In Pluche, or The Love of Art, Dutourd gives us a picture of the life and loves of a painter in Paris, and in its colors, the generous place that Dutourd has for art, its primacy, and that which it shares with love.
His inscription, uncommon here, also adds the touch- or touché, that underlines the story of Pluche with the author’s inspiration. And that’s amour too.

01/02/2024

This is Flatland; A Romance of Many Dimensions, in its original illustrated paperboard covers. Originally published in 1884, by one Edwin Abbott Abbott (don’t you just love it?) this is a 1950 copy of the sixth edition, said to be written by “A. Square.”
Contemporaneously it was taken largely as social satire, and the clever exploration of dimensions and their relations was relegated to second class. But now, 140yrs. later, Pointland, Flatland, Lineland, and Spaceland share a special place in the imagination, and at the frontier of its limits. Imagine if you will…

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