Just found this old list of “The 20 Best Travel Books of All Time” published by the Telegraph last year. Sadly, I’ve only read three. The ones pictured, to be exact. But I think I’ll put a few on my shelfari. Any suggestions?
Today I learned that you can order postage stamps online in Germany. Ordering postage stamps online is one of my favorite things to do, and I did this often when I was back home in the States, so you can imagine my delight.
It’s incredibly expensive to mail anything to the US from Germany. A postcard costs €1 and a letter, €1,70! So I bought these cute €1 stamps that celebrate the 150th birthday of Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf with an illustration by the German artist Wilhelm Schulz. The image depicts a scene from one of Lagerlöf’s best known works, a children’s book called The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, published in 1906. Three years later she became the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
One of my first encounters with great sadness must have been the day I set eyes on that iconic illustration of little Babar’s mother, shot by a hunter, lying dead in the jungle. My name being what it is (Celeste), I can assure you, my childhood was filled with plush elephant dolls with plastic yellow crowns on their heads, chipped but beloved cereal bowls adorned with a lady elephant in a red dress, and bottles of perfume fit for an ivory tusked queen. The fact that I threw up outside the elephant cage during my first visit to the zoo didn’t diminish my love for the massive, tough-skinned creatures; though perhaps the act was my two-year-old self’s form of protest, only understood three decades later. After all, a dark dingy room (as I remember it) is no place for an elephant king.
See Jean de Brunhoff’s original illustrations in the exhibition “Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors” through January 4, 2009 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The author’s son Laurent de Brunhoff, who continued the series after World War II, was at the exhbition’s opening September 19. Watch WNYC’s interview with him.
