25 MAY 1957

ANNE & BASIL STARR

 

 

 

A BEAK of BRASS, BARREN and BARE

Sometimes used books that bear inscriptions feel a little like discarded wedding gowns...

This peculiar inscription was found in a copy of Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame: a Life of Sylvia Plath. I wonder what became of Flis and Brenton.


'Dearest Flis,

"Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have washed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.

*

Mrs Ramsey, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused with force, burning and illuminating...

And into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare."

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse 

Love Brenton'
 
Dear Virginia is certainly fond of spray. I think I picked this one up from Basilisk Books in Fitzroy.

Nymph Wing

I have been much amused by the curios I've come across in second-hand books. I thought I might start documenting my finds.

I was delighted to find this wing in a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

I bought this book for my boyfriend at Alice's Bookshop, Carlton North.