Masquerade

While the Bibliophile blog has been in recess for some time, now is an ideal opportunity to bring it out of semi-retirement, masquerading as a literary travel blog.

Hopefully In the next few posts will be some photographs and a small amount of information on locations real & imagined as seen in books and films & tv.

Posts will be authored in the field on a phone - so no levels of sophistication or formatting, and subject to varying or non-existent connectivity.

Stay tuned...

100 years of Gumnuts

The original Gum-Nut Babies

May Gibbs (1887-1969) is one of Australia's most beloved children's authors and illustrators, and one of her most famous characters is celebrating 100 years of publication.

Inspired by the Australian bush, as well as her English roots, she created characters that were essentially European fairies with gumnuts on their head and flitted around the forests of Australia.

She used them on cards sent to friends and included one on the cover of a book she illustrated before writing them into her own children’s book. On December 5, 1916, during World War I, Gumnut Babies was published.

 
 The Gumnut Babies became an instant hit when they first appeared in a booklet published by Angus & Robertson in 1916 although their most famous members, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie wouldn't appear for another couple of years.
 
The first edition sold out and Gibbs would publish many more works based on the idea of Australian bushland fairies. She also produced greeting cards, bookmarks, postcards and other merchandise carrying her distinctive images.

Nutcote

Nutcote, overlooking Sydney Harbour

May died in Sydney on November 27, 1969, and many of her books are still in print.

Her Sydney house 'Nutcote' in Neutral Bay, was threatened with demolition in the 1970s, but was saved by the efforts of her fans & children's librarians around the country. It is now preserved as a museum to May Gibbs and her characters.
  

The Bad Banksia-men still eternally battling the Gumnuts & Lizard, in the Nutcote garden >>

Author haunts

50 Places Every Literary Fan Should Visit

For any excuse to travel - if you’re in an area that is home to a place that has some literary historical significance, you have to go and visit it. Well, Favorwire compiled this list of literary places all over the world that you should visit if you happen to be in the neighbourhood.

Mark Twain's house with Tiffany-designed walls & ceilings and a Twain made from Lego!

1. Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT
2. Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace & Museum, Oak Park, IL
3. Herman Melville’s grave, Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NY
4. Willa Cather’s childhood home, Red Cloud, Nebraska
5. Oscar Wilde’s childhood home, Dublin, Ireland
6. Baruch Spinoza’s house, The Hague, Netherlands
7. Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA
8. Yasnaya Polyana (Leo Tolstoy’s home), Russia
9. The Mount (Edith Wharton’s home), Lenox, MA
10. William Faulkner’s ‘Rowan Oak’, Oxford, MS

    

    Love the look of 'Rowan Oak'

11. Scribner Building and Charles Scribner’s Sons Building, New York, NY
12. Tennessee Williams lived in the windmill at the Stony Brook campus, Southampton, NY
13. O. Henry house and museum, Austin, TX
14. Friedrich Nietzsche-Haus, Sils-Maria, Switzerland
15. Jorge Luis Borges’s Buenos Aires, Argentina
16. Margaret Mitchell House & Museum, Atlanta, GA
17. Bronte Parsonage Museum, West Yorkshire, England 
18. Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Savannah, GA
19. Charles Dickens Museum, London, England
20. Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Indianapolis, Indiana
21. Truman Capote’s apartment, Brooklyn, NY
22. Nikolai’s ‘Gogol House’, Moscow, Russia
23. Dorothy Parker’s birthplace, Long Branch, NJ
24. H.P. Lovecraft’s Providence, Rhode Island
25. Honoré de Balzac’s residence Maison de Balzac, Paris, France
26. Karl Marx House, Trier, Germany
27. Mark Twain’s boyhood home and museum, Hannibal, MO
28. Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk created the Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, Turkey
29. Henry Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Concord, MA
30. City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA
31. Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Richmond, VA
32. Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Monk’s House for Bloomsbury Group in East Sussex, England
33. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace, St. Paul, MN
34. Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France (final resting place of Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, and many great authors)

    

    Joyce, still on the streets of Dublin

35. Walking around James Joyce’s Dublin, Ireland
36. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX
37. Franz Kafka’s grave, The New Jewish Cemetery, Prague
38. Les Deux Magots, Paris, France (Parisian café where Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and many others hung out)
39. Edward Gorey House, Yarmouth Port, MA

    

    The surely inspirational Williams windmill
40. John Updike’s home, Shillington, PA
41. Vladimir’s Nabokov House, Saint Petersburg, Russia
42. L.M. Montgomery’s Green Gables, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, Canada
43. Chekhov Library, Taganrog, Russia
44. Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur, CA
45. Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, Baltimore, MD
46. Jane Austen’s House & Museum, Hampshire, England
47. Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL
48. Arthur Rimbaud’s House, Harar, Ethiopia
49. Washington Irving’s grave, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, NY
50. The Algonquin Hotel, New York, NY meeting place of a group of New York writers, critics, actors and wits including Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx and Harold Ross.

OK, it is extremely American (which would be an excuse to fly to the U.S.), so we need to compile the definitive Australian one. I'll make a start -  number one has to be Nutcote the home of May Gibbs.

'Nutcote' on the shores of Sydney Harbour

Re graves, it would be Waverley Cemetery now home to Henry Lawson, Dorothea MacKellar and Henry Kendall...

The white marble forest of Waverley Cemetery, Sydney

The Shaw Neilson's cottage

Locally - that's John Shaw Neilson's home originally near Penola, S.A., now at Nhill.
Then there's Chauncyvale in Tasmania, the whole town of Gulgong (Henry Lawson's hometown), the Durack's Lake Argyle homestead in W.A. Kylie Tennant's Hut above Kylie's Beach at Diamond Head, N.S.W. Dingley Dell Cottage & Museum to Adam Linsday Gordon. The Colin Thiele sculpture (with Mr Percival) at Eudunda, S.A., the Norman Lindsay Gallery & Museum in Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains. That's ten, I could go on & on

So who else would you add?