#unelibraries

[mewomenwriters]

In case this rainy dreary Monday is getting you down, maybe this spunky pair of owls will motivate you.

They were drawn by Elizabeth Coatsworth and we found them tucked within her 1911 copy of The Seminaria, her senior yearbook from The Buffalo Seminary.

[mewomenwriters]

As the last four months of 2017 begin, we'd like to highlight a few of our World War I centennial letters from the Elizabeth Coatsworth collection. The war didn't directly affect Coatsworth much, however it did many of her friends. This is a letter from Robert Seaman in March of 1918, updating Coatsworth on their mutual friends.

The letter is dated, appropriately in light of Hurricane Harvey, "Sunday/Nothing but rain", and goes on to talk about Ronnie who "was gassed Sept. 30 and in a hospital and convalescent camps almost 3 months his heart was bad but as he says 'I'm all right now.'"

Ronnie "had the plate shot off his gun and got a dent in his helmet, can you beat it. Gosh we're glad he's home. He has boots that are rug destroyers."

[mewomenwriters]

Today’s #MondayMotivationOwl comes to us, not from our collection, but from the Abplanalp Library downstairs hallway. This colorful little gufo could cheer anybody up on this dreary, gray Monday.

[mewomenwriters]

We just acquired these Elizabeth Coatsworth family letters from as far back as 1887. Beth Leonard found them wrapped in a handkerchief in the attic of Chimney Farm!

[mewomenwriters]

Friday night, because of a headache which prohibited serious study (don't laugh) I went dancing for a couple of hours with a nice Holyoke lad I met two weeks ago.

Barbara Banker Kamar in a letter to her Paw, January 31, 1936

[mewomenwriters]

And now I'm back in the saddle of my Teaching Pegasus, a mysterious horse of a somewhat different color.

John Tagliabue, in a letter to May Sarton, 1975

[mewomenwriters]

from A. Carman Clark’s "ideas” files

bats

bathrooms

bedding

blueberries

cartoons

clams

cooking as an art

cremation

decks

education priorities

frogs and toads

hammers

house styles

Lent

living with children

mediocrity

microwave

nature

sexism

rhubarb

windsor chairs

[mewomenwriters]

You can look at figures like this and see figures, or you can see the running record of a man's life, the scratchings he made on the face of the earth; his doings. His history. One town, this size, it doesn't amount to much; but the world, after all, is only a mess of towns, some big, some small. The history of the world's nothing but town records of one kind or another...

Elbridge Gilman in Ruth Moore’s Speak to the Winds (1956)