Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Ashland--Bookshops and other domestic sites.


Perhaps laying it on a bit too thick

Some places around Ashland proper I like.

89 comments:

  1. It's called The Book Exchange. I love a slightly used book.

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  2. Me too, I rarely buy new ones (too expensive). Don't let me loose in a second-hand bookshop.

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  3. This is nice. Is it a very large university?

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  4. Oh my goodness, it is very telly isn't it. A very graphic way to make a protest and for people to see the reality of war. All of those deaths left grieving families behind somewhere.

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  5. Cute wee building, we have some very similar ones here in New Zealand. I am assuming the one petrol pump is for decoration now.

    Also I am noticing you don't have a shortage of bookshops.

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  6. Cute wee building, we have some very similar ones here in New Zealand. I am assuming the one petrol pump is for decoration now.

    Also I am noticing you don't have a shortage of bookshops.

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  7. 1880's looks about right to me for this house. When I lived in Lyttelton (the port of Canterbury) there were houses very similar to this dated around the 1880's - 90's.

    Why do you call it a Tom Sawyer house? Was this the kind of house Tom Sawyer was supposed to live in?

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  8. << used to own a beetle once but with a more conservative paint job lol

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  9. A human rights issue even. Nice looking church with it's heart in the right place.

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  10. Nice to see you, shame about the socks lol.

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  11. these are all really nice-lovely little town

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  12. Yes, it surprised me how tidy it was. I really liked the funkiness of the decor.

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  13. I'm the same way, Iri Ani. I enjoy the discounts. Books at the big chain stores are wildly overpriced. I only shop at the first-hand book places for Christmas gifts.

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  14. Not really for a place proclaiming itself a university--about 5,500 students at the main campus. It's large for a college, though. Mainly liberal arts students and a few science/business majors. I think it became a "university" to attract more out-of-state students, who have to pay higher tuition. Nice campus though.

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  15. It does bring home the impact, to see the whole expanse of lawn covered in little flags. Because we don't have conscription, a lot of people put Iraq and Afghanistan in the back of their minds. This helps.

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  16. I love this little bit of the past that is still standing. Yes, the petrol pump is long "retired" but the former owners kept it up.

    One of the advantages of a college town--lots of bookshops :-)

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  17. Shirley and I met at Sharon's bookshop when she was located downtown in a different building. Shirley was working weekends part-time for Sharon. We struck up a conversation while I was trying to steal a copy of "The Illustrated Lady Chatterley's Lover".*


    *This last part I made up.

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  18. Yes, I used to borrow a friend's "bug" that was a conservative light brown. :-)

    the lady who owns this one came up to me when I was taking this shot. Luckily, she was quite happy I thought it was so distinctive.

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  19. Sometimes I've seen pictures of houses you've taken and said, "that could be in Oregon". Maybe both Lyttleton and Ashland were settled about the same time.

    I call it a Tom Sawyer house because it reminds me of the Middle West somehow. Illustrations and film adaptations of Mark Twain's boyhood novels (set in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River) usually have houses that look this for the place he stayed with his "Aunt Polly".

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  20. I totally agree. Ashland has a lot of progressive churches, including the First Presbyterian, which is the one Shirley and I attend.

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  21. I totally agree. Ashland has a lot of progressive churches, including the First Presbyterian, which is the one Shirley and I attend.

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  22. Yes, Iri Ani. All the grizzles are long gone, shot by the white settlers. California used to have an estimated 100,000 grizzly bears and even put one on the state flag. They're all gone, too

    The local high school football team is called The Grizzlies even. We do have a few black bears left, but I've only seen one and he was being carted off for relocation by a couple Fish and Wildlife rangers. Another black bear was shot dead recently when he wandered to a local park and they couldn't tranquilize him.

    It's not fun to be a bear--outside a National Park at least.

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  23. They are a truly nerdy sight, aren't they? :-)

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  24. Thanks Red. I certainly feel lucky to live here.

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  25. I picked it out for the cool running boards, Fred.

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  26. I find that running boards are becoming more necessary as I get older

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  27. They also come in handy when the gang needs a quick getaway from the bank.

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  28. I suspect that that is a very brave thing for them to do as well.

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  29. Lovely house but not what we, this side of the pond, would call victorian. Not sure what exactly we would call it, perhaps colonial but I suspect that's not right either, should probably be applied to an earlier period again.

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  30. Well Howdy! Good to see you Doug and thanks for the tour. Maybe if I get time before emigrating eastwards I'll post some of my home town.

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  31. Haha. How nice to have met in a bookshop.

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  32. Lyttelton (on Banks Peninsula) was settled from around 1851. The earliest houses were still there I lived in one wee cottage) and then as time went on they got bigger as in this "Tom Sawyer house" example. One very like this was down the street from me (Coleridge Terrace) and was built in 1884.

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  33. lol she is probably used to people taking pictures of it.

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  34. No fun at all. Poor bears. This would be like us having our Kiwi as icon and they are all died out (which is a possibility if we don't take care of them)

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  35. I should take my camera down the road and get some pictures too. I have been meaning to do so for ages.

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  36. Yes it was Jim. Every week there was a group called "Women in Black" who used to gather once a week in the main plaza here to silently protest the war. A lot of people are quite rude to them as they drive by the vigil. It's easier in most parts of this area to be for the war.

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  37. Colonial is about right I think. Bit of a French style to these houses I gather--owing to the influence of New Orleans on American architecture.

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  38. Intersting coincidence, Iri Ani. 1851 is the exact year that the first settler buildings went up in "Ashland Mills"--named for the first flour mill built in the Rogue Valley and powered by Lithia Creek.

    The only white settlement older than that around here is Jacksonville, and only a year or two earlier. I'll have to get over there next week--since I;ll have some time--and I'll take a few pictures to see if we have further similarities between this area and Lyttleton.

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  39. It's amazing when one takes out a camera and looks about what interesting things about familiar places suddenly pop up.

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  40. I hadn't thought of that. She may have had it "customized" to get some attention. She has a lot of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix stickers and such all over the bumpers and similar spots. It really should be in a museum ;-)

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  41. Beautiful creatures the kiwis, and, unlike a grizzly bear, they don't chew you up if you interrupt their dinner. (Well, I hope not at least. )

    I hope they can be protected. I have fond memories of "Kiwi Shoe Polish" being around the house. My dad used it on his business shoes. I think my introduction to looking up stuff about NZ came from seeing that weird little birds pictured on the small circular cans that were sold all over America in department stores. (I have to research tonight and see if there was a connection to your country there.)

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  42. And the Kiwi Shoe Polish Story, Iri Ani, courtesy of Wikipedia. Turns out it came from The Other Country, but was named for a Kiwi lady:

    "The first shoe polish to resemble the modern varieties (aimed primarily at inducing shine) was Kiwi. Scottish expatriates William Ramsay and Hamilton McKellan began making "boot polish" in a small factory in 1904 in Melbourne, Australia.[8] Their formula was a major improvement on previous brands. It preserved shoe leather, made it shine, and restored color. By the time Kiwi Dark Tan was released in 1908, it incorporated agents that added suppleness and water resistance. Australian-made boot polish was then considered the world's best. Black and a range of colors became available, and exports to Britain, continental Europe, and New Zealand began. Kiwi polish is now owned by the Sara Lee conglomerate and imported from China. It is sold at Australian Woolworth supermarkets amongst others."
    He named the shoe polish after the kiwi, the national bird of New Zealand; Ramsay's wife, Annie Elizabeth Meek Ramsay, was a native of Oamaru, New Zealand.[9] It has been suggested that, at a time when several symbols were weakly associated with New Zealand, the eventual spread of Kiwi shoe polish around the world enhanced the Kiwi's popular appeal and promoted it at the expense of the others.[10]

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  43. I like this picture Doug, a great composition, the big and small of the buildings mirrored by the bikes.

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  44. I am a bit of an old bookshop fan myself. The town of Hay on Wye on the Welsh borders is full of second hand book shops and here it is the capital of 'book towns'.

    Each and every one a voyage of discovery at the fraction of the original cost, recycling information is an revolutionary act I think.

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  45. Nice environment to study, something about it looks vaguely Chinese to me.

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  46. What a brilliant idea, puts the whole thing into some sort of macabre perspective.

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  47. Nice building, looks sort of Mexican

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  48. So Shirley was the store detective that finally brought you to justice then Doug (I still cherish my copy of that pictorial classic)....she clearly made an honest man of you, excellent work.

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  49. With that white picket fence the house is as American as apple pie.... or Blue Velvet, a nice place anyway.

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  50. I think Oregon should secede from the Union, it could be America's own Denmark.

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  51. Nice to see a picture of the host Doug.....it is true, our familiar is somebody else's exotic, that's the great thing about diversity I think.

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  52. Yes, two floors of books and a small bakery/ restaurant on the mezzanine to boot, AA. A nice selection not only of best-sellers and classics, but a lot of books of medical, political and enviromental issues. A large framed poster of Virginia Woolf graces the stairway for the Bloomsbury tie-in.

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  53. Thanks. I was lucky the sunlight was just in the right spot when I came past this alley.

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  54. I remember reading an article recently about Hay on Rye and its book shops. I imagine its quite the mecca for real book sleuthing. So many smaller enterprises have been swamped by big chains like Barnes and Noble over here.

    "A revolutionary act." I hadn't thought of it quite that way, AA, but I think you're on to something. Provocative communication, beyond the mass media filters, should be shared and not just kept on a private book shelf
    Next to a decent public library, I think real education begins when one gets the cognitive tools to set out to find the books and magazine essays by authors who have written the counter-histories of the socio-economic past, the stuff you can't always get in a high school or university course.

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  55. Quite an impressive collection for an independant shop as well.

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  56. Indeed, I love the It was built in 1925, and is the major downtown landmark in the town. It was called "The Lithia Springs Hotel" originally and, later, when I moved to town twenty years or so back, "The Mark Anthony". It was so run down it was closed in 1997, and there was concern it might be a white elephant or eve torn down. The new owners gave it a complete renovation and its now close to its original exterior.

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  57. That it does,with the gateway and all. This main building in the 1930's was the whole college, originally called Southern Oregon Normal School. It was founded primarily as a teacher training institute.

    In 1937, an actor and English teacher named Angus Bowmer convinced the city mayor and the council to put on a local Shakespeare Festival. He got enough sponsorship support for a two week run of "Twelfth Night" and "Merchant of Venice" (Angus played Shylock, naturally).

    Mr. Bowner's enterprise put modern Ashland on the tourist map. He stayed on as director of the festival as it grew to a major theatrical locale until his death in the 1980's. The major indoor theater is named after him.

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  58. It did suit the purpose of making the war feel closer to home.

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  59. True. That adobe look is rare around here.

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  60. LOL--That she did. My career in property crime has been effectively squelched. I might as well be banging a tambourine in the Salvation Army now.

    PS--I still managed to get my hands on a paperback copy.

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  61. It's absurdly small-town Americana, AA. It does seem from another time.

    Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huck Finn" and David Lynch's disturbing "Blue Velvet" film of the 90's have a certain synchronicity now that I think of it.

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  62. Some cars have aged well. The bug to me is in that class.

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  63. The thought has crossed a few minds. We are one of the most progressive states in the union. Ashland has more more in common with Portland and the university town of Eugene up north than it does with our local communities around us. We are an island of Democrats and Greens and even a few Anarchists in a sea of Republican red. (Although Obama carried Jackson County--narrowly--last November.)

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  64. I think the Fall Season is the most beautiful around here.

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  65. Well put, AA. I enjoy sharing this local area in pictorial form since so many of my friends here have done similar visual essays of their localities.
    Thanks for your comments.

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  66. Very classic Doug I don't know much about your parts and this is certainly interesting...

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  67. The old indepandant bookstore nothing beats this! Seemingly they are coming to be less and less but I myself always did love ones like this - there was one that I recall I would get lost in.

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  68. Well there is the chief! A good picture indeed.

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  69. I kid you not in Yorkton Saskatchewan there is one old station that is just like this and they preserved it as a historical building and if I recall correctly it was the same company if not it was as we call it up here Esso.

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  70. It really is a great old building; I'm glad someone brought who could restore it properly.

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  71. There's nothing like getting 'lost' in a bookstore, Jack. It's sad that even in college towns so many are going by the wayside.

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  72. Yes, they used to have 'Esso' down here as well. Interesting that they went with the same design. Hard telling when this station opened but I'd suspect it had to be the 1920's.

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  73. And the vehicle is still running, which is even better!

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