{"id":257,"date":"2008-08-04T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbicmsblog.reedbusiness.com\/elogic_660000266\/2008\/08\/04\/a-booklovers-bench-in-camden-maine\/"},"modified":"2008-08-04T08:10:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T08:10:00","slug":"a-booklovers-bench-in-camden-maine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=257","title":{"rendered":"A Booklovers’ Bench in Camden, Maine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Last weekend I once again<\/a> had the delight of visiting Melissa Sweet’s home and studio in Rockport, Maine. This time my friend Jenn Dowell and I made the trip up on the occasion of Melissa’s wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive – everything $100 or less!) studio sale. In addition to coming home with some lovely pieces of art for myself and others, I came home with photos of a bench that was well worth blogging about.<\/p>\n

First, here’s a shot of the studio sale tents decked out in bright, Sweet fashion. (I took the photo below at the end of the day, when the crowd was a LOT thinner than it had been at the start!)<\/p>\n

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Next to Rockport is the town of Camden, Maine, where Jenn and I headed for some lunch then took a stroll up to the Camden Public Library<\/a>. The library is perched on a corner with the town’s picturesque main drag on one side, and a harbor-facing park on the other. Behind it is the BEAUTIFUL outdoor Ampitheatre<\/a>, in which (by complete, crazy coincidence!) illustrator Noah Z. Jones<\/a>‘ sister was about to start her wedding when Jenn and I happened to be walking by! (We didn’t know that’s whose wedding we were seeing until we mentioned the wedding to Melissa later and she gave us the scoop. I had planned to call Noah to see if we could cross paths but now I see he wouldn’t have been free anyway!)<\/p>\n

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To the left of what you see above, between the library’s lower, side entrance and the Ampitheatre is a small, circular space filled with beautiful plantings that comprise the library’s Children’s Garden. Bordering that space is a fantastic bench with supports cut in the shape of books "whose titles represent contributions Maine authors and illustrators have made to literature."<\/p>\n

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Here’s how the garden and bench appear as you first spot them from the harbor-facing street or as you exit the library’s lower level, which is home to the majority of its collection and fun children’s space, complete with child-sized lighthouse and child-sized dinghy.<\/p>\n

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The shot below was taken looking the opposite way, while standing in the middle of the garden. See the lovely curve of that bench?<\/p>\n

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Here it wends its way beneath the library’s windows.<\/p>\n

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And here are a few of the books above which you can perch and admire the passing pedestrians, the beautiful native flowers like lupine (made famous by Miss Rumphius<\/a><\/em>), and the bench itself! I’m assuming the title-less books that precede E.B. White’s tomes were left blank so that there’s room for future authors’ names to be added…?<\/p>\n

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There is one "non-book" item that also has a place in the bench’s carvings: a cat who sleeps (I hope!) atop The Cat Who Went to Heaven<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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I can’t think of many more lovely sleeping spots than in this seaside library garden!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I once again had the delight of visiting Melissa Sweet’s home and studio in Rockport, Maine. This time my friend Jenn Dowell and I made the trip up on the occasion of Melissa’s wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive – everything $100 or less!) studio sale. In addition to coming home with some lovely pieces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}