Destination: Books has supplied some of its favorite titles to Andersson Gardens in Avondale Estates. Andersson has put together holiday gift baskets to sell at the Avondale Estates Farmers Market on Sunday, December 4, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Shown here is a Festive Flora book from Kew Pocket Books. These books feature gorgeous botanical illustrations from the Royal Botannical Gardens' Kew Library and Archives.
Even though Destination: Books is a popup and online bookshop and not a bricks-and-mortar store, we are still an independent bookseller and a member of the American Bookseller Association. We are an affiliate and a beneficiary of the Bookshop.org program. (Bookshop.org is a collaboration between the ABA and the book wholesaler Ingram.)
For every new book purchased through the bookshop.org portal, money eventually is shared to hundreds of affiliates. Moreover, if you purchase any new book through the specific Destination: Books bookshop portal, we even receive an additional commission.
Our Destination: Books bookshop portal lists some of the books we have written about in our destinationbooks.net blog or have discussed with you while you visited our booth throughout the year (but you can search for any current title.) Furthermore Bookshop.org is offering free shipping on book orders until Monday midnight, November 28, 2022.
Thanks for your support of independent reading and thinking.
Between popups, I have been evaluating two books that may be of interest to our "adventurous” clientele.
Dan Chapman in his recently published A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey Through an Endangered Land mixes a travelogue with a report card on the Southeast’s various ecosystems from Kentucky to Florida. Chapman follows naturalist John Muir’s 1867 trek from Louisville, through Tennessee and Georgia to Cedarville, Florida but instead of traveling on foot through a war torn South, he goes by Subaru through a growing/sprawling South, which has prospered, depending on one’s definition of prosper, at great ecological cost.
Not only does Chapman reference Muir’s writings throughout, but he uses his journalistic skills to interview those on the front line of the Southeast’s fight against species disappearance, water pollution and habitat loss. His chapter on the 2008 coal ash flood in Kingston, Tennessee is especially poignant, especially when you consider North Georgia has been bringing the toxic coal ash (a byproduct of coal firing plants) from other states.
Likewise, in Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, Jody Rosen takes the reader to distant lands and a journey through history. Rather than try to write a definitive, Pollyannish, account of this newly crowned symbol of green living, Rosen explores the gray areas of the bicycle (or velocipedes as it was known early in 19th century England) mixing in personal experiences and a travelogue.
Rosen effortlessly (always a good sign of a skilled writer) meshes the bicycles current standing with its checkered and uncertain past especially with airplanes and automobiles. In one chapter, Rosen travels to the St. Giles Church in Buckinghamshire-west of London to see a stained-glass window that is graced by an early (biblical?) bicycle. The minister explains why so many make the pilgrimage. “A thing you learn about this job is the people like mysteries, I think as much as they like certainties.”
These words of wisdom explain why this book is so good.
Note: Our next popup at the Freedom Farmer's Market is scheduled for Saturday morning, November 19th. You can also find these two books at our online Destination: Books store.
Just like those Gardening Best Practices books which suggest that you rotate your veggies in the garden from year to year, Destination: Books is rotating its book inventory for our next pop-up on Saturday morning, October 22nd at the Carter Center's Freedom Farmers Market in Atlanta.
Here's a sample of some of the new titles you can expect to see:
Kew Pocket Books
Gorgeous botanical illustrations on Herbs and Spices, Wildflowers, Japanese Flowers, Fruit, Festive Flora, Herbs and Spices coupled with detailed captions. Artistry made available from the Royal Botannical Gardens' Kew Library and Archives.
Books about Fabric Dyeing
My longtime partner Denise (who does a lot with fabric) curated these two books that she suggests is inventory worthy.
The Modern Natural Dyer: A Comprehensive Guide to Dyeing Silk, Wool, Linen and Cotton at Home by Kristine Vijar. This book is kind of Dyeing 101 book written for the person who is just starting to learn about dyeing.
Journeys in Natural Dyeing: Technic for Creating Color at Home by Kristine Vijar. This colorful book is more of an in-depth guide to dyeing techniques from around the world.
These May Interest as Well
Growing Perennial Foods: A Field Guide to Raising Resilient Herbs, Fruits and Vegetables by Arcadia Tucker. She is the author of the popular Tiny Victory Gardens book, which is a solid book for beginners with limited space.
The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Seed Histories of Remarkable Vegetables by Adam Alexander. Inspiring stories about vegetables. Putting the culture in horticulture.
Destination: Books will be managing the books sales at the opening for Drew Langsner's This is Not a Chair: A Popup Exhibit of Recent Sculpture on Friday evening, September 30th in Avondale Estates. Although this is not our normal venue, it does fit in with what we like do— to display and chat about some fine books such as Langsner's Country Woodcraft: Then and Now.
Country Woodcraft was originally published in 1978 and this revised edition from Lost Art Press includes an additional hundred pages in its original format of landscape binding and printed on #80 matte coated paper for superior image reproduction.
Langsner revisits his earlier work which gives it a "delightful conversation with his younger self" quality.
The exhibit is open to the public.
Last Saturday (9/17) was a little different at the Destination: Books popup book stall at the Carter Center's Freedom Farmers Market here in Atlanta. In front of our booth, we noticed a small entourage surrounding a man who we soon recognized as Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey),
Senator Booker was in town to campaign for Raphael Warnock for senator and Stacey Abrams for governor. He stopped by our book stall and chatted briefly. With our wide selection of books about gardening, the environment and sustainability, he was interested in several titles, and he bought something for one of his staffers. (Being professional booksellers, we remain discrete.)
A few minutes later Stacey Abrams appeared at the Market. Even though it looks like in the picture she is browsing at our books, a closer look reveals that she is actually looking beyond the book rack. (She probably recognized that we don't carry any of her books.)
True VIPS
Though Booker and Abrams made things interesting, our real VIPS are regular customers who stop by browse and engage with us. We always enjoy talking about books, hearing about what you are reading and swapping ideas.
Our next popup is scheduled for the Freedom Farmer's Market on Saturday morning, October 22nd.
We’re turning the page from summer to fall, here at Destination: Books. Instructional books about growing vegetables like The Whole Okra, Epic Tomatoes and Square Foot Gardening forfeit shelf space to more off-season fanfare such as Year-Round Indoor Gardening, Plants Are My Favorite People. and A Sand County Almanac.
In Year-Round Indoor Gardening, Peter Burke provides convincing instructions on how you can grow your own ingredients for healthy, tasty salads year-round. His methods are low-tech, low impact and do not require grow lights or even a window with southern exposure. With an abundance of color photographs and drawings he shows how you can fight off the moody blue feelings that can crop up at the end of the gardening season.
When your outdoor gardening activities are limited, one can pivot to house plants. In Plants Are My Favorite People, Alessia Resta provides a colorful guide and inspiration to turning your living space to an indoor arboretum. (She keeps 200 plants in her 750 square foot New York City apartment). Not only does she cover the basics of determining what mix of plants and involvement best suits you, but she includes how-tos on repotting, pest control, and fertilizing. She includes a list of 26 popular house plants that can get you started in the right direction.
A Sand County Almanac's -- That Rare Combination
A Sand County Almanac is the 1948 Aldo Leopold classic that now includes a new introduction by Barbara Kingsolver. It hits a Destination: Books' sweet spot -- a book that intersects good writing, with natural world and environmental themes, and travel (to different places and time.) The first part of Leopold’s book chronicles a year on his farm in Wisconsin and it is filled with simple but poignant observations. For example, in the entry "February,", Leopold is forced to cut down a nearly century-old oak tree fatally damaged by lighting. As he saws through the tree he ruminates on the ecological history of the state:
"Now our saw bites into the 1920's, the Babbittian decade when everything grew bigger and better in heedlessness and arrogance--until 1929, when stock markets crumpled. If the oak heard them fall, its wood gives no sign. Nor did it heed the Legislature's several protestations of love for trees: A National Forest and a forest-crop law in 1927, a great refuge on the Upper Mississippi bottomlands in 1924, and a new forest policy in 1921. Neither did it notice the demise of the state's last marten in 1925, nor the arrival of its first starling in 1923.
In March 1922, the Big Sheet tore the neighboring elms limb from limb, but there is no sign of damage to our tree. What is a ton of ice, more or less, to a good oak?
Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for breath."
Part Two are short sketches from Leopold’s life (1886-1948) in the Midwest where he grew up, and travels in Canada and the Southwest. Before he settled permanently in Wisconsin, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico and Arizona.
The final third of the book includes four essays summarizing how we to change our thinking about natural world. Kingsolver describes one of the essays “The Last Ethic” as a “classic classroom text and the manifesto of a movement.”
Return to Freedom Farmer's Market
Destination: Books will be at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center on Saturday morning, September 17th. We were rained out last week, but we'll be back with our partners from the Carlos Museum Bookshop with plenty of new titles and ready to chat about books.
Rainwater and books don't mix and considering the iffy, rainy forecast for Saturday, September 10th, Destination: Books is postponing our popup at the Freedom Farmer's Market to Saturday morning, September 17th.
As always, the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center goes on rain or shine, but we won't be there tomorrow.
I've been getting ready for The Great Georgia Pollinator Census on August 19-20, 2022 for over a year now. The University of Georgia extension service created the census to promote pollinator conservation. Last year I recorded the numbers and types of bees, wasps and butterflies that were visiting some of the flowers in my local community garden and filed it with the Census website.
This year I have been able to expand my range of recordkeeping choices. Beginning in the Spring of 2021, I started trying to regenerate an eroded scrub area that was a neglected part of my development. Books like Farming While Black, Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conversation That Starts in Yard, and The Living Soil Handbook, have provided some of the inspiration and instruction. I've added some better soil with some compost, terraced it and planted some lavender, black-eyed Susans, and marigolds—the latter two I started from seed after taking an online Wylde Center gardening class last winter. A few of my neighbors have donated some other plants as well as their time watering and trying to control the weeds. What used to be just some scrub vegetation, badly eroded soil (mainly clay really) has now become the beginnings of a garden that attracts bees (not butterflies yet).
Adding to the community vibe a regular customer came by our Destination: Books booth at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center last month gave me some native milkweed plants to attract monarchs, which I have added to my meadow mix.
Our next popup at the Freedom Farmer's Market is Saturday, September 10th, but in the meantime, you can sharpen your pencils and print out a scorecard to participate in the upcoming pollinator census.
There are two books that have been at the forefront of my thoughts lately. One is Ministry for The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and the other is Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.
Ministry for the Future
The recent high temperatures in the U.S. and Western Europe remind me of the opening chapters of Ministry for The Future, Robinsons speculative novel about the not-to-distant future of a planet coming to grips with global catastrophe. Robinson’s book begins with a cataclysmic heat event in India killing millions of people.
Depressing reading? Yes sorta, but as you read on, the Robinson book shows that the future doesn’t have to be so bleak if we combine technology and a willingness to make political change--even if it takes some real arm twisting. The book shows us a way out and that is a cause for optimism. For more about the book, visit a posting "Speculating on the Future" on my companion blog. There you will find more about the book and links to Ezra Klein's recent interview with Robinson.
In the interview Robinson remains guardedly optimistic. He thinks the planet has reached a sweet spot that climate change definitely has our attention (no small task) and it’s not too late to do something about it. This makes sense. If things are too catastrophic then we are too overwhelmed to do anything, but if the negative impact is too mild then it is too easy to ignore.
Alas, we have reached the sweet spot of misery.
Entangled Life
Like Ministry this book is supposed to change your life, which is always makes me skeptical, but you cannot read it and not be amazed about all the possibilities. What I appreciated about Sheldrake’s short book is that he provides a readable overview of how fungi have played an unheralded pivotal role in the planet’s ecosystem.
He includes chapters on defining the fungi (e.g., truffles) and how they operate in labyrinths underneath our feet. There is a chapter on lichen (which are well suited for space travel BTW), the long history of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the possibilities of mushrooms being used to combat pollution and soil contamination. There are some color photographs to illustrate Sheldrake’s book including this oyster mushroom growing out of jar of old cigarette butts. *
Both Ministry and Entangled books address these topics individually, but what contributes to their popularity is that they provide a vision of the possibilities if we just “think outside our skulls," as Sheldrake writes.
You can browse through both books at our next pop-up at the Freedom Farmers Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Saturday morning, July 30th.
*This photo of the Sheldrake book comes from Rob McCoy who has written a mushroom classic entitled Radical Mycology, where he has used a white rot fungus, the Pleurotus mycelium to grow oyster mushrooms from used cigarette butts.