Hobbies Odd

Truly a lovely day out on Wednesday.



Drove with teenybuffalo and skogkatt out to Edward Gorey's house, which is haunted in the best sort of way. There are wainscot worlds within worlds there: congeries of pebbles; drifts of every ticket stub from every ballet in New York for fifty years, like a bright unleaving in Terpsichiore's wood; his Mikado paper dolls; ominous bibelots; a cat-clawed sofa; a cat, complacently black-spotted and of monstrous size; skeleton weathervanes; his vanity; delirium in whaleshape; an illustrated elegy for an amputated toe (not his); puppets; passementerie; sketchbooks; the last of his fur coats and white tennis shoes; the Doubtful Guest's scarf; the Victorian hearse finial in which they bore his ashes to the sea.



Unfortunately, only a few of his 25,000 books were on view.



Kind docents had scattered all of Gashlycrumb Tinies about the house, for children to find: Amy on the stairs, head downward; Titus's mystery box; George's legs sticking out from under the rug.



There was a case with his childhood drawings in it, looking rather Crowleyesque. The earliest, Sausage Train, he did at eighteen months.



A lovely man, clearly.



Then we had an excellent, hilarious lunch at the Optimists Cafe, which does overlapping all-day breakfast and all-day afternoon tea (on silver curates).



We went on to Parnassus Books, where I found a fortieth anniversary edition of Lolly Willowes; and, Mr. Fortune's Maggot, with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone:  600 were printed "for friends of the author ... Christmas 1966").  Less exquisite but unusual:  George Sylvester Viereck's Salome.  He turned up on my desk in my librarian days: a pro-Semitic Nazi who wrote the world's first gay psychic vampire novel (full of deathless ellipses), and was--I'm not inventing this--Tesla's good friend.  Sadly, the African grammar should not have been left on the dollar table to raise my hopes. They wanted serious money for it.  Pity.  It contained such noble practice sentences as:  "The elephant is deep in the waterhole and cannot get out" and "Sharpen your machete to serve your boss well." And for you? A slice of the leg?



After that, we went to a salt marsh and looked at shorebirds and the great-grandfather of all horseshoe crabs on the prowl; and at last--O blissful!--to a proper beach.  The mermaids swam and I waded (I own nothing I can swim in) and beachcombed to my heart's content. The sand was a half-inch of burnt ochre over silky deep dark umber: most unusual. There were many lunar snails carving paths to the sea.



Nine