Rhythms of repetition circle our days. The sink full of dishes, empty only moments ago. The elusive laundry basket of holding transforms full to empty to full again. Spherical embroidery of life winks in the corner of our eye.
This time of year, it is common to be on the hunt for engaging books to read, and the Macmillan's Pocket Classics are always top of the search list. This November I found Poe's Prose Tales on eBay from a seller in Sheldon Connecticut. The inscription on the inside cover of one of the previous, possibly the original owner is Robert O. Boyd. There is also the word Enterprise, most likely a town as it is capitalized, as well as what appears to be Oregon (although it is squished along the edge, the g is distinctive from the the y and p in the other writing).
Engage research mode on the interwebs... we found the most likely match for Robert.
Robert Osborn Boyd was born on 29 July 1903, in Kennewick, Benton, Washington, United States, his father, Daniel Boyd Sr, was 27 and his mother, Mary Ethelwyne Axtell, was 28. He lived in United States in 1949 and Portland, Multnomah, Oregon, United States in 1950. He died on 10 September 1979, in Alexandria, Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, at the age of 76, and was buried in Enterprise, Wallowa, Oregon, United States.
We were a bit miffed at first why this book was in Connecticut if the previous owner wrote they lived in Oregon. Old books of this age usually don't travel quite so far east from a westerly home, especially in early to mid 20th century. People moving west was a normal course of trajectory in that age and time. This book seemed a long way away from home but the information we found tells us that when Robert passed away in Virginia this book stayed behind on the east coast and his body came back to Oregon.
Always interesting to research where the books in our collection have traveled.
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Over the past 100 years we have been persuaded to become the ultimate consumer, perhaps against our will, and most definitely without our conscious knowledge.
Below is from "A Brief History of Consumer Culture" published on
The MIT Press Reader. Which is an article adapted from Kerryn Higgs
book “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet”
Sobering words to ponder:
Frederick Allen wrote in1931, “Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate
consumer. Unless [the consumer] could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the
whole stream of six-cylinder cars, [], cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric
ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.”
"President
Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes welcomed
the demonstration “on a grand scale [of] the expansibility of human wants and
desires,” hailed an “almost insatiable appetite for goods and services,” and
envisaged “a boundless field before us … new wants that make way endlessly for
newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” In this paradigm, people are
encouraged to board an escalator of desires (a stairway to heaven, perhaps) and
progressively ascend to what were once the luxuries of the affluent."
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If the soul has a say in where it was to be placed on earth, the conscience keeps no remembrance. If it was merely a request, how does it know that it was granted or den
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Wisdom from my aviator husband.
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Seasons undulate drop by flake, full to empty, cycling through the color wheel with dizzying accuracy. Driven by the magnetic force under Atlas's unconscious control, seasons tilt us awry. Our season may yet again bloom, heavy with bounty, laden with laughter.
~MDJune ~
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