Book of Days

If you are longing for cooler weather in the midst of this long hot summer, I’ve got some good news: Bartlemas comes on Monday. St. Bartholomew’s Day. His feast day is a most literary one but it also provides a nod of acknowledgment to the subtly shifting wheel of the year and, in particular, of summer beginning to yield to autumn. We’ll be celebrating Bartlemas with a traditional Bartlemas Wayzgoose at Convivio Bookworks beginning this weekend and on Monday evening, too. If you’re local, please come! It’s an open invitation. We’ll have a print project on the press for you to print (a good quote from John Adams) and my sister is making not one, not two, but three different flavors of pizzelle (a cookie made in a press), and we’re serving our own Horn & Hardart Automat Coffee and we’ll see what other fun we can conjure up. And the shop, of course, will be open for fun, eclectic shopping… and our Autumn Preview (Hello, Spooky Season!)

So, what’s all this bookish Wayzgoose fuss over St. Bartholomew, anyway? He’s a saint with a connexion to all the disciplines of the Book Arts. He is, first of all, one of the patron saints of bookbinders. Not much is known about St. Bartholomew himself. He was one of the Twelve Disciples. He is thought to have traveled to India, but tradition says that he met his end in Armenia in the first century. His martyrdom was a gruesome one––one that by association made St. Bartholomew a patron saint of butchers (a common trade amongst my paternal ancestors) and of tanners and of bookbinders, who very often bind books in leather. I’ll leave the details of his martyrdom, based on those associations, to your imagination, but early bookbinders decided his patronage of their craft was a natural fit.

There is a connexion to papermaking, too, and for this, we go back to the days before glazed glass windows. Back then it was only the wealthiest people who could afford glass windows, while the rest of us simply had openings in the walls and shutters. All summer long the shutters would be open, letting in the cool nighttime breezes. As we approach the end of August, though, you’d certainly be thinking about preparing for the chillier days to come in fall and winter, and it was the local papermaker you went to, for he had been making special paper at this time of year, paper heavily infused with beeswax, that you would install inside your shutters, to help keep the elements out and the warmth in, and the day to do this task was traditionally––you guessed it––Bartlemas.

It’s the printers who really made a big deal of Bartlemas, especially in England. One result of putting waxed paper on your windows is a reduction in natural light. And so the window paper went up in the printing offices and out came the candles and lanterns so typesetters and printers could see what they were doing. A good print shop proprietor would make a celebration of this day. This celebration came to be known as a “Wayzgoose.” The reason for the name is, sadly, lost to time. But Randall Holme, in 1688, gave us this description of the Bartlemas Wayzgoose:

It is customary for all journeymen to make every year, new paper windows about Bartholomew-tide, at which time the master printer makes them a feast called a Wayzgoose, to which is invited the corrector, founder, smith, ink-maker, &c. who all open their purses and give to the workmen to spend in the tavern or ale-house after the feast. From which time they begin to work by candle light.

To be sure, there was a good quantity of ale consumed as part of the Wayzgoose. In some places, mead, the delightful intoxicating beverage made from honey, was the beverage of choice. Especially in Cornwall, where a Blessing of the Mead ceremony takes place even today at this time of year. Continuing the road of connexions, our friend St. Bartholomew is also a patron saint of beekeepers, and as we continue to gather our stores for the coming winter, it is traditional, too, to bring in the honey crop on his feast day.

And so we raise our glasses (or our tankards) on Bartlemas, and especially in print shops, as we ponder candlelight, and the coming end of summer, and books and paper and the power of the press. I do hope you’ll join us if you live nearby. We’re in lovely and quirky Lake Worth Beach at 1110 North G Street, Suite D, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460. Hours of our Wayzgoose celebration: Saturday & Sunday August 22 & 23 from 11 AM to 4 PM, and Monday Evening, August 24 (St. Bartholomew’s Day) from 5 to 9 PM.

Dark of night grows longer
as Summer slips away;
Whilst books & prints & paper
honor old St. Bartlemy’s Day!

SEPTEMBER WRITERS’ WORKSHOP
I, myself, have signed up our next workshop: True Stories Cleverly Told: Exploring Creative Nonfiction for Narrative, Essay, & Memoir with writer and literary agent Cricket Freeman, on Saturday September 19. Cricket is one of our favorite people in the literary world. She and I met several years ago at a weeklong writers’ workshop in Gainesville and Cross Creek, Florida, at the home of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, called “Writing the Region.” The experience of both the workshop and meeting Cricket transformed my writing. You will learn a lot! Cricket’s workshop is a full-day class that includes a delicious box lunch from one of our favorite local spots, Aioli in West Palm Beach. Class limit is 8 people; 5 seats currently remain. If you love writing, I encourage you to do this.

That’s all for now. If you’re a Convivio Book of Days reader and you come to our Wayzgoose, please do say hello! I’ll most likely be the one showing you how to operate the printing press. We can eat cookies together!

Happy Bartlemas!
John