I don't know either

Oops! It seemed I scanned pages 10 & 11 out of order. Now that I've got that straightened out, the conversation should flow better.

18th century bookstore?

Saturday night bonus post: I'm at home trying to draw the last pages of Chapter 7, but my brain doesn't feel like cooperating tonight. Have a few more questions I can't yet answer:

Books weren't as rare in 1760s as in previous centuries, but how did people buy them? The wealthy and educated prided themselves on their private libraries, but how did they stock them? Did they travel to purchase books in person, belong to some kind of book-of-the-month club, trust the task to a personal servant, or say to the sellers "just send me whatever is appropriate"?

If you went to buy books in a city, did they have a typical "bookstore" or did you go to the printer's, full of printing presses, newspapers and playbills?

Also, Allan and Stephen must eventually come out of mourning, so I'm debating the color and style of their new clothes.

A few notes on my research

When trying to learn about logging in England in the 18th century, I couldn't turn up anything. Why? England had practically no forests left. I could and did turn up information on logging in the New World, but had to look at it with a critical eye and a grain of salt.

Why? Well, if you read about logging in a New England context, it was done in the winter. This was because it was easier to drag those great big trees around when there was a thick blanket of snow on the ground. New England had so much snow and ice that horse-drawn sleighs were the winter mode of transport.

Yeah, England doesn't get that much snow. If they travelled more in fall and winter, it's because the roads were an impassable muddy mess in wet weather.
Perhaps it would be similar to logging in the American West in the 19th century. The two cultures are completely dissimilar, but the tools could be the same...? I couldn't find out which season logging took place in. It's not the kind of thing people write in books. Transportation? Where the railroads didn't go, the trees were transported by water. Railroads weren't invented yet in the 1760s, so river it was. That team of horses is dragging the trees to the river, where they will float downstream to their destination.

In the end I used mid-1800s photographs of logging in the American West... and  didn't go into much detail, since my information is not too reliable.

I check dictionary.com on any words that I'm not certain are period-correct. Here's a sample of the things I looked up yesterday. I'll let you try to figure out why:

Correct: dwarf, pygmy, freak (certain meanings of the word)
Not: Circus(not invented), midget, side-show(American West), penny gaff (1800s), belittle (American in origin).

Uncertain: The difference, at this place and time, between a tea house, coffeehouse, and tavern. All were places where men gathered socially and talked sports, gambling, politics, etc. A club was similar but required membership. An inn offered overnight accommodation? One of more of these is probably the equivalent of bar, but it's hard to be sure. None of them equates to a dance club- these were men's haunts. There were dance hall assemblies, viewed somewhat dubiously, and private parties where dancing might take place, but on the whole, the sexes didn't mingle much socially.

Not so rhetorical questions

Shipbuilding, and yes. But that's for the readers to know, and the characters to guess at.

Perspective

And that is the end of THAT conversation. Now we can return to discussing casual murder.

Bizarre Abraham Lincoln memorabilia

..there's a lot more wrong in the elfy forest than we first thought.

On an unrelated note, I have to admire the way dead guy's head thunks off the cliff.

Yesterday, I got to evaluate a collection of Civil War letters dated 1862-63, penned from Simeon Darling to his wife Melinda. They were bundled together with a print of Abraham Lincoln and a partial copy of the Gettysburg Address. The letters were originals. I can't verify the age of the other documents.

But it really opened my eyes to the bizarre types of memorabilia available. It goes way beyond photographs and newspapers. Would you like to buy wallpaper from the room where Abraham Lincoln died? Ebay has it. You'll pay a pretty penny. How about a word penned by Abraham Lincoln? Someone has cut one of his letters into single words, printed up certificates of authenticity, and is selling them for $59 per word.....

I think I'm in the wrong line of work. With a little more creativity and a little less honesty, I too could be hawking single words and shreds of old wallpaper...

 

A change in weather

It must be summer.

Up til now, it's more like an extended spring. It's rained almost every day for 6 weeks, and the 4th of July was so chilly I wanted a sweater.

So this heat wave is a bit of a surprise.

Tell you what. Instead of sitting here sweating buckets as I type out a long blog post, I'm going to go into the one room that has AC, work on Chapter 7, and try not to die of heat stroke.