Cities. Isn’t it wild that something so obvious to modern life is the topic of so many books?

No, because we are humans with minds that crave to understand ourselves and our ways of living. Here are some books that play to that desire from a myriad of perspectives, that offer very different ways of ultimately making sense of a happy life in today’s geography: the city.

GARDENING: The Balcony Gardener, by Isabelle Palmer, $19.95, Cico Books

This book is literally an aesthetic inspiration from cover to cover. Palmer introduces the tools for growing in balcony containers, and presents a book that is at once fun (one spread is titled “Cocktail Window Box,” pgs. 94-95) and educational, with concise explanations about everything from “All About Potting Mix” to “Salad Crops.”

COOKING: The City Cook, by Kate McDonough, $20.00, Simon and Schuster

Apparently a projection of TheCityCook.com, this book explains pantry planning for delicious meals at home in the city. McDonough has studied urban planning and French cooking, and worked as a business executive. Wouldn’t you trust it?

I would be amiss to mention this book without also putting in a plug for the myriad of awesome cookbooks we house in the huge cooking section. Love visuals in your cookbooks? Step-by-step instructions or encyclopedic Spanish cookbooks? Need something about how to improvise or how to make a schoolyard vegetable garden or how to design a professional plate? We have it all.

(SUB)URBAN PLANNING: Walkable City by Jeff Speck, $27.00, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Speck co-authored Suburban Nation (2000), which is in its 10^th anniversary printing and still a relevant text. But what excites me about the brand new book Walkable City is that it tackles the problem of suburban sprawl in a horizontal way: it stands by the positive potential of cities in light of the sprawl.

How Buildings Learn by Steward Brand is about reading buildings and cities. Brand seems to appreciate cities through investigating their history, which is a different perspective but equally compelling and hopeful about the potential for our living spaces going forward.

URBAN CULTURE: A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook, $27.95, W. W. Norton & Co.

This brand new book seems to utilize case studies of St. Petersburg, Bombay, and Shanghai, to make an argument about the part of social influence in the global order of today.

The breadth of these “city” books is poetic. I just remembered a striking book of poems I read in college called Ideal Cities. In it, Erika Meitner paints a landscape inside her baby’s nursery via the contrast with the urban frontier outside. What better way to illustrate the great part that modern geography plays in our very identity?

by Whitney

House of Earth, a previously unpublished novel by folkartist Woody Guthrie, has been released this month by Infinitum Nihil (Johnny Depp’s publishing imprint with HarperCollins). This novel was finished by Guthrie some 66 years ago. It was never published and though the reasons are not clear why Guthrie didn’t follow through with the publishing process, it is clear that he did want this for the public <his design for the book was that it be turned into a film. He sent it to a producer, but it never panned out>. Maybe this was disheartening? The truth of why this was never published is unknown and any reasons given would just be conjecture.

The good: the book was found, it was published, you can read it.

The book is divided into four chapters and is about 200 or so pages. There is also a lengthy intro written by Douglas Brinkley & Johnny Depp {I would recommend reading this last, as an afterward}. Something I really loved about this book was the art, which is all pulled from Woody Guthrie’s stacks. The cover is beautiful and the little pieces that introduce the book and close it are simple and cool. Each chapter has a print as well. All really nice looking. Props to the people involved with the books layout (other than that misplaced afterward, but that’s easy to fix).

House of Earth has the feel of those freaky beats poets, but with a hillbilly tongue. The story follows a couple, Tike & Ella May Hamlin, in their struggle to live in the dusty Texas panhandle as sharecroppers. The land is harsh and their house is a wooden, creaky, rotten, sun and wind beaten shack. Tike and Ella May dream of a better life. A life with a piece of land they can call their own. A life with a house that is true and strong, one that will keep the critters and dust and wind and snow and everything else out. They lay their hope in the dream of an adobe house. A house of earth.

I liked this book a lot. The story is compelling, and it rips at the heart fibers. It made me feel anxiety ridden over the main character’s plight. Though it was written in ’47, it is not unrelatable. With so many people in debt today, so many forced out of their lives by natural disaster, and the capitalist machine still in fine form, this novel speaks easy and with force.

This book is an inoculation from the past.

<I think it’s the right time for this aged injection>.

The best Valentine’s day presents are always handmade (Just ask your mom, she still has that red construction paper heart with the doily glued to it that you made her in first grade). In honor of the holiday that we all love to love (and love to hate) I thought I’d provide a step by step guide on how to write your own, one-of-a-kind valentine for that special someone (or your favorite Lemuria bookseller).

1. Get some supplies.

Don’t be scared to branch out from the red paper, white lace theme. There’s nothing wrong with good, old lined paper. It might just bring back memories of illicit notes passed in high school.

A Perfect Heart

 

To make a perfect heart you take a sheet

of red construction paper of the type

that’s rough as a cat’s tongue, fold it once,

and crease it really hard, so it feels

as if your thumb might light up like a match,

 

then choose your scissors from the box. I like

those safety scissors with the sticky blades

and the rubber grips that pinch a little ski

as you snip along. They make you careful,

just as you should be, cutting out a heart

 

for someone you love. Don’t worry that your curve

won’t make a valentine; it will. Rely

on chewing on your lip and symmetry

to guide your hand along with special art.

And there it is at last: a heart, a heart!

-Ted Kooser, from Valentines

2. Don’t try to plan out what you are going to write. Follow where the poem leads you.

A little obscure? Think about it this way: If you are going to go for a walk, you know where you are starting, and at some point, you’ll need to return to where you began. But you don’t know what route you will take or what you will see along the way. Don’t be scared to make a wrong turn; you can always retrace your steps.

In Time

The night the world was going to end

when we heard those explosions not far away

and the loudspeakers telling us

about the vast fires on the backwater

consuming undisclosed remnants

and warning us over and over

to stay indoors and make no signals

you stood at the open window

the light of one candle back in the room

we put on high boots to be ready

for wherever we might have to go

and we got out the oysters and sat

at the small table feeding them

to each other first with the fork

then from our mouths to each other

until there were none and we stood up

and started to dance without music

slowly we danced around and around

in circles and after a while we hummed

when the world was about to end

all those years all those nights ago

-W.S. Merwin

3. It’s a love poem, don’t be scared to be sentimental.

Keep in mind, though, you want to be specific. Don’t say what everyone else says. Say something special about the person or how you feel. You love them more than Oreo cookies? Say that. But what is your favorite part about Oreo cookies? The cream or the cookie? Are the 2 of you an Oreo cookie? etc.

Love Song for Alex, 1979

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;

the lover of my life, my youth and age.

My heart belongs to him and to him only;

the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage

Now grown to years advancing through the dozens

the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire

fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder

but all my days of Happiness and wonder

are cradled in his arms and eyes entire.

They carry us under the waters of the world

out past the starposts of a distant planet

And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean

they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories

where we have been together, you and I.

-Margaret Walker, from This is My Century

4. It doesn’t have to be happy. But if it is happy, that’s okay too.

Some of the best love poems are a little bit bitter, a little bit melancholy, a little bit sarcastic.

5. Not in love? Well, write a love poem about not being in love.

I feel horrible. She doesn’t

love me and I wander around

the house like a sewing machine

that’s just finished sewing

a turd to a garbage can lid.

-Richard Brautigan

We would love to read your poems, so feel free to post them on our blog or Facebook!

I love a good bad guy.  Sometimes the bad guy is the good guy but most of the time he is just a really bad guy.  In Rodger Dobb’s Ghostman, you are introduced to a true anti-hero, Jack Denton, or at least that is what he has been called before; he is a ghostman.  What is a ghostman, you ask?  Well, he must be able to change his appearance and disappear, he ” has to be confident in the way he acts, talks and behaves”, he must leave absolutely no trace of his true-self behind.  He has no fingerprints, no memorable characteristics, he lives off the grid, he has no past, and he is clever, very very clever.

“Jack” is very good at tracking down missing people and things, so it is no surprise when he receives a phone call one day from Marcus, an old colleague.  Marcus, who we quickly learn would really like to see Jack dead, is in dire need of Jack’s particular skills.  That morning in Atlantic City, a casino heist went astray from Marcus’ plans, leaving one of the two robbers dead and $1.2 million dollars missing.  Jack knows that getting involved with Marcus isn’t the best idea, but he “owes him one”.  Hmmm…maybe our friend Jack does have a little bit of a past.  If the money isn’t found within 24 hours, it will self-destruct.

Let’s not forget the rest of the cast of characters Jack meets along the way: The Feds, the local police, and “The Wolf”, the head of the Atlantic City underworld.  The pressure is on and what a ride it is.  Don’t miss this one!

My boyfriend of several years, Justin Schultz, is a (extremely talented if I do say so myself) freelance graphic designer and illustrator and having been living with him for the past few years I’ve come to genuinely appreciate all things graphic design related.

Typography is one thing that’s really grabbed my attention since Justin and I have been together.  In my opinion it really takes talent to make single letters eye catching and noticeable while also being legible.

That being said, when I first saw that Penguin was putting out this Drop Caps series my eyes lit up quite bright.  This is some of the prettiest typography I’ve come into contact with in the book world.  They are putting out a book for every letter of the alphabet, all of which are great classic novels.

Here is what has been published thus far:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

This series is a great way to build a library of the classics that look amazing on your shelf.

by Zita