Where have you been?

Recently, times have been looking like this: reading books in bed, with my beautiful Alfred.

Also today, we visited the Medical Museum.

Reading List

I picked these up at my local charity shop recently- Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, a collection of stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, for £1 each. I also found Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, which I read first and really enjoyed. I never tend to buy brand new novels, so I am usually quite behind on recently published works. There is something about the excitement of finding them on the shelf of a charity shop, already thumbed through and slightly worn; especially if the book was given as a gift with a small message written in the front. The pile of books on my bedside table is getting ridiculous and threatens to fall on to me in the night, but if you have any suggestions of books you enjoyed recently, let me know.

Hello there

...welcome to the Skeleton Vine. A place to document my work and that of those who inspire me, alongside a selection of the books I find in my library job and an ever-growing collection of treasures from my flea-market travels. As of September I will begin studying Printed Textiles and Surface Pattern Design at LCA, so expect to see bits of that here too. I do so hope you will follow along.

I have been building up a huge pile of new books recently, mostly discarded library books. I found this 1965 St John's Ambulance manual a few months back, for the bargain price of 10p! I love the colour schemes of medical books from this era, usually black, white & red with amazing illustrations. Graphic and a little gruesome.

I have another great vintage medical encyclopedia I will post images from soon. If you have anything similar from this era please photograph them & show me! 

In case you were wondering where the blog name comes from: 

"I rose to watch the flashes, and lo! the wonder of the world! In the blackness of the mid-NIGHT, in the fury of wind and rain, the dead vine had flowered. Five white, moon-faced blossoms blew gaily round the skeleton vine, shining back triumphant at the red lightning. I gazed at them in dumb wonder. Dear, dead vine, whose will had been so strong to bloom, that in the hour of its sudden cut-off from the feeding earth, it sent the last sap to its blossoms; and, not waiting for the morning, brought them forth in storm and flash, as white night-glories, which should have been the children of the sun." 

- Voltairine de Cleyre