I found myself sitting on the foyer floor looking at a bookshelf. It’s an odd collection– grouped more for what it looks like than for true content. Except for the art books. All of the crappy old art books that are not those which Daughter C left in the Apartment are on these shelves. Heck– I’ll just show you.

See what I mean? Maximally crappy old books. Anyway, I found myself lighting on Literary America: A Chronicle of American Writers from 1607-1952 with 173 Photographs of the American Scene that Inspired Them (1952).

From Captain John Smith, to Cotton Mather, Paine, Irving, to Davy Crockett (?), and the usual suspects including, I am pleased to say and see, James Whitcomb Riley and his Old Swimmin’ Hole, all the way down to Eudora Welty, the authors

sought to convey pictorially the places which inspired their [American writers] work or became famous because American authors wrote about them.

From what I know about Eudora Welty I would’ve thought the authors would have chosen a small town Main Street or small Southern city neighborhood not the Natchez Trace. But then again what I know about Eudora Welty is her photography more than her writing. So what do I know?

All in all it’s an interesting– eclectic, even– selection of authors and photographs. Some expected– Main Street, Wineburg, Ohio in the early ’50s where Anderson’s Old-timers still sit– some not so– a lamppost for Edith Wharton.

Whoa! Four pages of Faulkner??

It was a big squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies and heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what once had been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated it even the august names of that neighborhood. Only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting at stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps– an eyesore among eyesores.

–Faulkner, A Rose for Emily