A preview of a Northwest book that I’ll have at the Using Books booth at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, October 14-15, 2006 at Seattle Center:

The Friendly Mountain
by E. B. Webster, Illustrations by Annette Chaddock Swan, Port Angeles: The Evening News, Inc., 1921. Second Edition.

An appreciation of Mount Angeles:

“It is a peculiar feature of mountain climbing that, as one ascends, the surrounding country appears to draw nearer. The city of Port Angeles gradually draws nearer until one can pick out the individual buildings, and can almost see the people walking along the streets. The government buildings in Victoria, eighteen miles away, are plainly seen. With a glass, one can make out the guns at Fort Worden, near Port Townshend, forty miles distant. The surf breaks along the beach at the mouth of the Elwha, or off the Dungeness spit, though something like ten and twenty miles distant, respectively. One can count every skiff in the salmon fishing fleet off Ediz Hook, seven miles distant. Every ship in the strait is plainly visible. The ranches from Port Crescent to Sequim are easily distinguishable. One is amazed to see how large a portion of the country always thought of as timbered is really under cultivation.”

And from the Miscellaneous shelf:

The Art of Bundling: Being an Inquiry into the Nature & Origins of that Curious but Universal Folk-Custom, with an Exposition of the Rise & Fall of Bundling in the Eastern Part of No America
by Dana Doten with Drawings by Lee Brown Coye, New York: Countrymen Press and Farrar & Rinehart, 1938

A study and defense of the 18th Century American practice of bundling, or sharing beds:

“Thomas Jefferson praised the virtures of country life, planned for an America unsullied by urbanism, free, happy, and rustic. The society which Jefferson hoped to perpetuate, dreamed of perfecting, was, among other things, a bundling society. We no longer bundle. Nor do we win Revolutions and produce Thomas Jeffersons.”