Bookish Delights

Want a miniature author doll?  Check out this Etsy shop!  Debbie Ritter creates tiny dolls from literature--authors and characters.   So tiny and so charming!

From Dostoevsky to Poe, King Lear to Anna Karenina.  Found via Mary's Library.





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Have you sometimes wondered who may have inspired a character?  Is the author using a real person for  the physical description,  the personality, or the situation?  Often the details of a description seem so real that it seems possible that the author is describing someone he knows, a real conversation, or a personality or behavior quirk  observed in person.

This site has photographs of the real individuals who inspired some familiar literary characters (found via Cornflower).  The inspiration for Alice in Wonderland is well known, but one photo inspiration was quite surprising.   

When I was about fourteen, I watched The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (the Midnight Movie offered many classic films that had me falling in love with Arsenic and Old Lace, Harvey, Rear Window, etc.).  At that time, long before the ease of Google, I had to go to the library to find more detail about something that interested me.  Usually,  my desire to know more about characters or events was stimulated by reading, but the film version of Evelyn Nesbit in The Red Velvet Swing sent me in search of a nonfiction account of the scandal.

Evelyn was certainly beautiful and fascinating, but that she should have been the face that influenced the description of that particularly well-loved character--surprised me.
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These luminaries from children's book pages are magical.  Olden Designs Etsy Shop.


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I've been doing some book page folding and have made one more book doll.  Rather than trying to catch up on the many reviews that need to be written, each day finds me folding book pages, working with clay, and embroidering with some of my new floss and perle cotton.