A question for the pop culture critics

I've just started listening to an audiobook edition of Jane Eyre narrated by Juliet Stevenson. (Did anyone see her recent PBS Mystery turn? It was great.) Stevenson is terrific, but hearing the spooky scene in the Red Room makes me wonder if Stephen King has ever credited it as inspiration for the "Redrum" motif in The Shining? Does anyone know?

I know this has happened before,

but when do you think trick-or-treating starts when Halloween is on a Saturday? I can't believe Hopey has been running things since January and still hasn't gotten back to us on this.

I guess it wasn't all candlelight and butter churns

Or maybe it was, and that was the trouble.

What did your 1970s look like?

I'm weeding the Horn Book's collection of professional, scholarly, and other adult books about children's literature, and damned if I didn't find a strange little trend. Along with the many out-of-date bibliographies and childhood reading memoirs by the foremothers (don't worry, I'm keeping those) are lots of coffee table books devoted to the work of Rackham, Nielsen and Dulac, all published in the 70's and designed with the same disco-deco look of this here Bette Midler record. You used to see these books on remainder tables in bookstores all over; if anyone is feeling nostalgic just come and grab 'em from the discards shelves outside my office.

Propp was a piker

Here's how to quantify a folktale:


Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Books under wraps

Lolly took this neat picture of what our book collection looks like during remodeling. I can't quite tell where in the alphabet this is.

One scary mutha

I can't remember how to link from within comments but yesterday's post about over-controlling caregivers reminded me of Lucy Lane Clifford's 1882 "The New Mother," which I instruct you to read before bedtime:

"If we were very, very, very naughty, and wouldn't be good, what then?"

Then," said the mother sadly--and while she spoke her eyes filled with tears, and a sob almost choked her-- "then," she said, "I should have to go away and leave you, and to send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail."

If you need a good Christmas cry