Category Archives: Book of Days Calendar

Jul 01 2026
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Book of Days Calendar, Summer

The Dog Days, or Your Convivio Book of Days for July

In case you’ve not noticed: It’s hot out there. Here in Lake Worth, we were doing pretty well up until about three weeks ago, and suddenly it was full-on summer, and this is it: we know it’s here and it’s going nowhere for quite some time. And so we accept our lot. It is the price we pay each year for mild winters.

As July begins, so soon will the Dog Days of Summer. Sirius, the Dog Star, in the constellation Canis Major, is about to begin rising with the sun each day. This happens each year around the Third of July 3rd, and the sun occupies the same part of the sky as Sirius through the middle of August. This annual astronomical event happens to coincide with the hottest time of the year for many places in the Northern Hemisphere. Hence: the Dog Days of Summer, ruled by Sirius.

And for your Convivio Book of Days calendar for July this year, we’ve found a penny postcard from Germany, circa 1904, that celebrates Hundstage, which is German for “Dog Days.” This is not the only one we found! It seems to have been a thing, this fascination, in Germany, with Hundstage. Here’s another one, printed a year earlier, in 1903 (click all the images in this post to make them larger):

I’ve only been to Germany once, and it was during Hundstage, the Dog Days, and well… it was pretty warm. Warmer than Lake Worth? No. But where we have the modern convenience of climate control, in Germany (and Austria, and Switzerland, and Northern Italy), at least six years ago during our visit, we did not. Perhaps it is that total immersion in the weather that made Hundstage so fascinating to penny postcard producers at the turn of the 20th century.

Enjoy this month’s calendar! It is, as usual, our gift to you; a PDF that you may print and post to your bulletin board. You may also share it online; we’d love that.

This First of July brings not just the calendar but Canada Day, the national holiday of our neighbors above the 49th Parallel, and we will soon be celebrating, in three days’ time, our semiquincentennial here in the States. 250 years of the American experiment and the times are interesting, are they not? We get stars and stripes that day, plus fireworks that night (stars, perhaps, of a different sort). And on the Seventh of July comes Tanabata, the Star Festival of Japan, celebrating not the dog star Sirius but two other stars: Altair and Vega, two lovers separated forever by the Milky Way, save for one night each year: the seventh night of the seventh month. It is traditional, on Tanabata, to write wishes on strips of paper and then take them outdoors, and tie the wishes to the trees, where they may speak to the wind, and perhaps find their way to the universe to be granted.

 

NEW SUMMER WORKSHOPS
We have two new workshops posted to our website at the WORKSHOPS page! The first is a new Convivio Cookery workshop: Ricotta Gnocchi, set for Saturday August 15, 2026. (That’s my Grandma Assunta’s birthday and she would love that we are teaching you how to make homemade pasta that day!) We’ll teach you how to make a lighter gnocchi; our recipe skips the heavy potatoes and instead uses fresh ricotta: a delicious and much lighter alternative.

The second workshop, in September, is a writing workshop that I am definitely taking: 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. You will learn a lot! The writing 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 in each workshop is 8 people.

 

 

NOISE BRUNCH
Finally, we invite you to join us for something completely different: The 2nd Noise Brunch, on Sunday July 12, from 1 to 4 PM. The Noise Brunch is, in fact, not brunch, but it is an afternoon of experimental music and sound moving between silence and noise. I’m not sure exactly what that means, either. But I will be there to find out. We’re all for trying new things! The Noise Brunch is a free event at Convivio Bookworks. Come and go as you please during the event; you know we have limited seating. The shop will be open that Sunday, too, for eclectic (and most likely noisy) shopping.

 

 

Postcard images are public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jun 03 2026
6 Comments
Book of Days Calendar, Juneteenth

We Must Live as Brothers: Your June Book of Days

It’s June and here is your printable Convivio Book of Days calendar for the month. For this month of solstice and midsummer night’s dreaming and several saints’ days and Father’s Day and Bloomsday, we’ve opted to focus on Juneteenth, with a picture of a mural in Washington, DC, that was painted for Juneteenth in 2020. It’s a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: We must live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.

My hunch is the mural is no longer there. But if I’m wrong, please do let me know. The mural was on the Miller & Chevalier Building on what was then called Black Lives Matter Plaza. The two-block long street mural with the huge yellow letters is gone, of course; it was removed a little over a year ago.

In 2021, a year after this mural was painted, Juneteenth became a federal national holiday. Opal Lee, a woman born just a few days after my own mother (both Ms. Lee and my mom will be 100 years old this October), fought hard most all her life to get Juneteenth, once little known outside of Texas, recognized as a federal holiday. I remember being shocked when I heard the news. I have been shocked in different ways in the past year and a half, and find myself feeling that way far more often than I like.

I don’t know how Ms. Opal Lee feels about the state of the country as she approaches her 100th birthday this year, but she knows, better than anyone, I’m sure, how the road that brought the respect of Juneteenth to us was never an easy one. Sadly, we’ve had progress toward respect for all, and then it’s been walked back. Our history is a troubled one, and healing and respect are not part of the current plan, it would seem. With Juneteenth, though, we get another shot at making things right.

SHOP HAPPENINGS
The shop will be open this Sunday, June 7, from 11 AM to 4 PM, during our next workshop: I’ll be teaching a Case Bound Journal bookbinding workshop that day, and there are currently 2 seats left (perhaps you and a friend should sign up!). Our next Convivio Cookery workshop is my favorite pasta, Mambricoli, the following Saturday, June 13 (5 seats left). And we’re making plans for our Midsummer Solstice Market… it’s planned for Friday June 19 through Sunday June 21. We’ll have some good Midsummer Magic in store for you!

We also have a Juneteenth card in stock!

 

 

May 01 2026
7 Comments
Beltane, Book of Days Calendar, May Day

The Garden, or Your May Book of Days

One winter or early spring when I was a boy my mom saved up several Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxtops and sent them in to the Kellogg’s Company and in exchange, an envelope full of flower seeds arrived in the mail. There were packets of zinnia seeds, and morning glories, and cosmos, four o’clocks and snapdragons and marigolds and who knows what else. We planted all the seeds that spring in one little plot in the front yard along the neighbor’s hedge. It was quite a lovely little flower garden, and one day I even saw a photographer out there, shooting pictures. I told Mom about that, and she was certain it was a photographer from the newspaper, and that our flowers would be in the paper. I’m not sure if she really believed that or if she was just telling me a story, but I felt that she was right. Our little flower garden, in my view, was worthy of news coverage.

Gardening was nothing new. Each year Grandpa would plant tomatoes and basil and eggplant and peppers and rocket and other staples of an Italian vegetable garden. But flowers were new to me. And the seed packets! They were so beautiful. A colorful illustration with the name of the flower printed in sharp black letters at the top. That was the first time I really noticed seed packet illustrations, and it made quite an impression on me. By the following winter, I was scouring the W. Atlee Burpee Catalog, and the George W. Park Seed Company Catalog, ordering seeds for next spring’s garden. I was thoroughly disappointed when the seeds from the mail order catalogs arrived in plain packets, rather than illustrated ones. Lesson learned.

At any rate, it is May, and here is our monthly gift to you: the printable Convivio Book of Days Calendar for the month. Our cover star this month is a seed packet from an even earlier time than Mom’s 1970s mail order stash from Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The packet gracing our calendar was first printed in 1900. Long before that, as far back as the late 1700s, the Shakers began selling garden seeds in packets for home gardeners. I came to love their seed packet designs once I began seeing them in my research at the Shaker Library at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community when I first went there for a book arts internship in 1996. The Shaker seed packets I saw there did not have beautiful illustrations but their typography was beautiful (which was indeed not the case with the plain packets I received from Burpee and Park when I ordered through the mail that winter in the late 70s).

Being the First of May, it is May Day, which is also known traditionally as Beltane, the day’s Celtic name. It is a cross quarter day: halfway between equinox and solstice. It is a time of increase. The days lengthen (as they’ve been doing since the Midwinter solstice in December) and we are fast approaching the longest day, which, for us in the Northern Hemisphere, will come with the Midsummer solstice in June. In traditional reckoning of time, today would be the very start of summer… which is why the approaching solstice takes the name Midsummer (even though the solstice is, by the almanac, the first day of summer). This approach has always felt more balanced to me. To have summer begin just as the days start to get shorter feels, to me, like the choreography of the sun and planet is a bit off. I like the old names Midsummer and Midwinter, and so I use them for this reason.

If there are maypoles in your neighborhood, this is very likely the day you’ll see them decorated with ribbons and flowers. You might also find a paper basket or cone full of flowers hung on your door, a rather sweet old tradition practiced by children. Most likely, if you live in the United States, the day will pass without notice. May Day and Beltane are celebrations not widely celebrated here. There are many such celebrations, thanks most likely to our Puritan roots and our tendency to work, work, work. But alas, as the saying goes, All work, no joy, makes Jack a dull boy.

OPEN STUDIOS DAYS: THIS WEEKEND!
Come see us at the shop this Saturday & Sunday, May 2 & 3, from 11 AM to 5 PM, as we (and other artists throughout Palm Beach County) open our doors for Palm Beach Cultural Council’s Open Studio Days. We’ll teach you how to make a small accordion book, perhaps with a bit of hot foil stamped text, and we’ll be serving cookies and our new Horn & Hardart Automat Coffee. Those things are free and on the house! Also free: help us continue writing the Exquisite Corpse story we began last weekend during Independent Bookstore Days. The story is coming along nicely and is, indeed, quite surreal (as the Surrealists, who invented this literary game, would have wanted it to be). We’ll also be open for great eclectic shopping, too, of course. We’re at 1110 North G Street, Lake Worth Beach, Florida 33460. CLICK HERE for the details, and also to browse our online catalog, and do come by this Saturday and Sunday, please!

 

Image: A seed packet from the Miss C.H. Lippincott Seed Company. From the Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection. Print on paper, 1900 [Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons].

 

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