Quentin Blake: Clown

a must!!!

Organizing the Bookcase

© Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp and Sean Ohlenkamp

found via: http://www.whatkatieate.blogspot.com/

Relic Design: bookshelves

Reduce·Reuse·Recycle

I love these...

original location…

from: http://relicinteriors.wordpress.com

Forest

http://www.designartist.co.kr

Ideal Bookshelf by Jane Mount

Quoted from: Ideal Bookshelf

Quentin Blake: Clown

a must!!!

Bookworm: Re-reading Roald Dahl's "Boy"

Liquorice Bootlace and Ratitis... 

an excerpt of Roald Dahls Childhood Memories.

(.../...)On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet-shop. No we didn't, we never passed it. We always stopped. We lingered outside, gazing in at the glass jars of Bull's-eyes and Strawberry Bonbons and Acid Drops and the rest. Each of us received sixpence a week for pocket-money, and whenever there was money in our pockets, we would troop in for a pennyworth of this or that. My favourites were Sherbet Suckers and Liquorice Bootlaces.

One of the boys, named Thwaites, told me I should never eat Liquorice Bootlaces. Thwaites's father, who was a doctor, said they were made from rats' blood. "Every rat-catcher," the father had said, "takes his rats to the Liquorice Bootlace Factory, and the manager pays tuppence for each. Many a rat-catcher has become a millionaire selling rats to the Factory." "But how do they turn the rats into liquorice?" the young Thwaites had asked his father. "They wait until they've got 10,000 rats," the father had answered, "then they dump them all into a shiny steel cauldron and boil them up for several hours. Two men stir the bubbling cauldron with long poles and in the end they have a thick, steaming rat-stew. After that, a cruncher is lowered into the cauldron to crunch the bones, and what's left is a pulpy substance called rat-mash."

"Yes, but how do they turn that into Liquorice Bootlaces, Daddy?" the young Thwaites had asked, and this question, according to Thwaites, had caused his father to pause and think for a few moments before he answered it. At last he had said, "the two men who were doing the stirring with the long poles now put on their Wellington boots and climb into the cauldron and shovel the hot rat-mash out onto the concrete floor. Then they run a steam-roller over it several times to flatten it out. What is left looks rather like a gigantic black pancake, and all they have to do after that is to wait for it to cool and to harden so they can cut it into strips to make the Bootlaces. Don't ever eat them," the father had said. "If you do, you'll get ratitis."

"What is ratitis, Daddy?" young Thwaites had asked. "The rats the rat-catchers catch are poisoned with rat-poison," the father had said. "It's rat poison that gives you ratitis." "Yes, but what happens to you when you catch it?" young Thwaites had asked. "Your teeth become very sharp and pointed," the father had answered. "And a short stumpy tail grows out of your back just above your bottom. There is no cure for ratitis. I ought to know. I'm a doctor."

We all enjoyed Thwaites's story and we made him tell it to us many times on our walks to and from school. But it didn't stop any of us except Thwaites buying Liquorice Bootlaces. At two for a penny they were the best value in the shop. A Bootlace, in case you haven't had the pleasure of handling one, is not round. It's like a flat black tape about half an inch wide. You buy it rolled up in a coil, and in those days it used to be so long that when you unrolled it and held one end at arm's length above your head, the other end touched the ground.

Sherbet Suckers were also two a penny. Each Sucker consisted of a yellow cardboard tube filled with sherbet powder, and there was a hollow liquorice straw sticking out of it. (Rat's blood again, young Thwaites would warn us, pointing at the liquorice straw.) They were delicious, those Sherbet Suckers. The sherbet fizzed in your mouth, and if you knew how to do it, you could make white froth come out of your nostrils and pretend you were throwing a fit.

Gobstoppers, costing a penny each, were hard round balls the size of small tomatoes. One Gobstopper would provide about an hour's worth of non-stop sucking and if you took it out of your mouth and inspected it every five minutes or so, you would find it had changed colour. We used to wonder how in the world the Gobstopper Factory managed to achieve this magic. "It's your spit that does that," Thwaites proclaimed. As the son of a doctor, he considered himself an authority on all things that had to do with the body. He could tell us about scabs and when they were ready to be picked off. He knew why a black eye was blue and why blood was red. "It's your spit that makes a Gobstopper change colour," he kept insisting. When we asked him to elaborate, he answered, "You wouldn't understand if I did tell you".

Then there was a hard brown lozenge called the Tonsil Tickler. The Tonsil Tickler tasted and smelled very strongly of chloroform. We had not the slightest doubt that these things were saturated in the dreaded anaesthetic which, as Thwaites had many times pointed out to us, could put you to sleep for hours at a stretch. "If my father has to saw off somebody's leg," he said, "he pours chloroform on to a pad and the person sniffs it and goes to sleep and my father saws his leg off without him even feeling it." "But why do they put it into sweets and sell them to us?" we asked him.

You might think a question like this would have baffled Thwaites. But Thwaites was never baffled. "My father says Tonsil Ticklers were invented for dangerous prisoners in jail," he said. "They give them one with each meal and the chloroform makes them sleepy and stops them rioting." "Yes," we said, "but why sell them to children?" "It's a plot," Thwaites said. "A grown-up plot to keep us quiet." (.../...)

(excerpt from "The bicycle and the sweet-shop", in "Boy" by Roald Dahl)

Bookshelves

found @ http://convoy.tumblr.com/page/2

bookshelves

quoted from: http://www.freundevonfreunden.com/xenia-hausner/

Ideal Bookshelf

I'm trying to decide what 20 books would be on my ideal bookshelf, and i'm having a hard time...

these two bookshelves are pretty close to what i like...

I know Harry Potter is on my bookshelf (definitely in my bucket)

but if i chose all 7 of them i would only have 13 more to go... 

so i am "working" on it...

so far: 

Harry Potter 

J.K Rowling 

****

Momo

 Die Unendliche Geschichte (the never ending story)

 by Michael Ende

****

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

Boy 

Going solo

The Witches

by Roald Dahl

****

Märchen der Brüder Grimm

(the 1937 edition)

****

Green Eggs and Ham

Dr Seus

****

The Very Hungry Caterpillar 

Eric Carle

****

Pride and Prejudice

Persuasion

Jane Austen

****


Der kleine Vampir
Angela Sommer-Bodenburg

These would be the first i can think of, and probably  my all-time favorites... i am sure i am missing tons of other books i love...

i should maybe try to separate my first books (all of these except for Jane Austen and Harry Potter ...) and my later books, or by decade... but so far, i would pick these as my all-time favorites, after all they are the first to come to my mind... and i would (and have) re-read them over and over again...

What 20 books would be on your bookshelf?

http://idealbookshelf.typepad.com

Ideal Bookshelf by Jane Mount

http://www.janemount.com/portfolio/Projects/Illustration/Bookshelf.php

http://idealbookshelf.typepad.com/

http://www.etsy.com/shop/janemount?section_id=7434284

Gift ideas for kids: "Drawing: For the Artistically Undiscovered"

Just got back from a girls day out with my niece Carmen (6).

 She L·O·V·E·S books, 

so i got her this marvelous and fun one: 

Drawing: For the Artistically Undiscovered  

by Quentin Blake and John Cassidy

If you have kids, this is a must!!!

About the book: A sketchbook with training wheels from Quentin Blake, one of the most celebrated illustrators in the world today. Inspirational artwork, shameless cheerleading, helpful technique tips and lots of what-to-draw ideas share each page with plenty of white space reserved for the use of the artist-to-be. Included with each book are an artist-quality sketch pen and two watercolor pencils, one red, one black.

A little Sneak Peak: 

Find·Found·Found: The Native Trees of Canada

Found this BEAUTIFUL book on Design Sponge and it's already on my wish list.

Sketchbook by Leanne Shapton

I looked the book up and found more images and descriptions on other pages.

*************

For more info on the book check out these sites:

** http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/11/09/turning-over-a-new-leaf-leanne-shapton%E2%80%99s-latest-book-is-an-artistic-ode-to-canada%E2%80%99s-majestic-foliage/

** http://drawnandquarterly.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html#4942256463409535973

** http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/books/review/31shapton.html

** http://www.amazon.com/dp/1770460322/ref=asc_df_17704603221283685?tag=stylefeeder-20&creative=395261&creativeASIN=1770460322&linkCode=asn

 

Gadgets: the nook

 

It took me a while to buy an e-reader, then one day i did it, a spur of the moment kind of thing, i tend to  do this every now and then, act on impulse... I hadn't done any reseach, but i had looked at a few e-readers, and i had had this one in my hands a couple of times...
well, 2 months later i have to say i am really happy. It's a lot of money, and  ebooks are not much cheaper (if at all) than paper books, but:
1.- i travel a lot so i do not have to worry about carrying extra books along.
2.- the sreen is nice to read, the size is great, and it is lighter than some books.
3.- the one i have has a wifi internet  option, so i can check my email (i have had trouble with my yahoo account, but not with the gmail one) and browse a little... if you are looking to really surf around the web, this is probably not your gadget...
4.- the battery last a long time without charging (if you do not use the internet)

ok, and there is also a thing i do not like too:
when i have downloaded or created my own .pdf files  they are not displayed on the nook as they are on the computer, this is the nook takes the metadata (?)  author  and title and this makes it kind of difficult to find some files. I still haven't figured out how to change this, if at all possible.

Other than that i have to say i am pretty happy with my nook!!!

DIY Bookshelf from Amy Hunting