Chapter 48 Bliss and the Perfect Halloween Horror Movie for Antiquarian Booksellers

Sunday afternoon was bliss. It was National Chocolate Day. You know what that called for, don’t you?

Two cups of Early Grey from another book teapot:

Shelf lean?

This one features real authors and titles, and the lid is a book opened to a Shakespeare sonnet. It goes so well with my book geek mug:

And, in honor of National Chocolate Day, of course, I added this:

But what really made my enjoyment of this treat the best was the arrival in the mail of these, which I could read while I snacked:

Fine Books and Collections and Firsts Magazines

On Sunday night, we celebrated the impending arrival of Halloween with Monster Mash Dinner. The menu consists of little of nutritional value: Mummy dogs (hot dogs wrapped in crescent roll dough and baked — dots of mustard for the mummy eyes), witches brew (orange smoothies), jello molded in the shape of a human brain (yes, being a mother of two boys, I actually have a jello mold that looks like a human brain), and jack-o-lantern cake for dessert. (Actually, I think the whole dinner is pretty much dessert.) I don’t cook this much junk food too often, but Tom and Huck just love it when I do! We did have carrots, broccoli, and celery sticks before dinner to get in a little bit of vegetable. Then, in an (almost futile) effort to get Tom and Huck to appreciate reading, I read aloud from this recent library sale find:

Finally, while folding laundry Saturday evening, I flipped on the television and found the perfect Halloween horror movie for bibliophiles: The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you might remember that I once forced my husband to sit through a three hour movie so I could see a five minute scene of old books. Well, The Ninth Gate has beautiful old books in almost every scene. It also features the home libraries of millionaire book collectors (at least a movie’s idea of what that might look like). And being a film adaptation of The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, it has a decent plot. The main character in this movie? An antiquarian bookseller, albeit not a completely honest one. The end of the film is a little bit silly, but oh those books, those beautiful, beautiful, exquisite books! If, like me, you’re enough of a book geek to watch a movie for its books alone, I give this one a Near Fine!

See you in the stacks!