Book of Days

August is a time of abundance of the summery sort: peaches and plums, raspberries and sweet corn. It is a month of small celebrations and the August edition of the Convivio Book of Days Calendar is here to help you mark them all. The month begins today with Lammas, the celebration of the first harvest, our escort toward autumn. It is, in Italy, the time of Ferragosto, when folks leave the cities and head for the sea. It’s a tradition that dates back to Ancient Rome, and it matters not how much it confounds tourists to Italy (good luck finding open restaurants should you visit at Ferragosto).

In Maine on the 6th, at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, it is their celebration of the Arrival of the Shakers in America: one of their most important celebrations. Seth and I were privileged to share in that celebration once when I was a print intern there with Brother Arnold Hadd. It was one of the most magical evenings I have known, sitting there in the 1794 Shaker Meetinghouse and joining them in reflection and song as the sun set over the village. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I swear the Shakers through the ages were present in that room with us.

It is the time of Obon in Japan, the beautiful outdoor festival celebrating and honoring the dead with street fairs, bon odori dances, and at the festival’s conclusion, thousands and thousands of illuminated lanterns set on the water, each carrying the spirit of an ancestor off to the other shore until next year’s return.

And for us printers and book artists, it is the month we honor St. Bartholomew, a patron saint of bookbinders and book artists and it is in his honor that the traditional printers’ Wayzgoose celebration comes, marking the day each waning summer when printers typically began setting type by lamplight and candlelight once again, for sunlight was no longer enough. Lammas, at the start of the month, reminds us that summer is ripening all around us; the Wayzgoose brings a more concrete reminder of the approach of winter.

This month’s calendar is, as usual, a printable PDF document designed for standard US letter size paper, 8 1/2″ x 11″, easy to print, easy to pin to a bulletin board, a nice accompaniment to the Convivio Book of Days blog. Enjoy.

My birthday is on the First of July and so that makes me, according to some of my Canadian friends, an honorary Canuck, for my birthday falls on Canada Day. I find this all very interesting, because I was supposed to be born on the Fourth of July, a “real live nephew of my Uncle Sam,” as the song goes, but I was early for something for once in my life, arriving three days early and on the national holiday not of my native country but of Canada. What is odder is when I speak in public, which turns out to be pretty often (and even this is odd as I’m a pretty shy guy, generally), people often ask me afterward where in Canada I’m from. Toronto? Alberta?

I chalk this up to a couple of things: First, as a shy guy, I am a quiet guy. My voice doesn’t carry well and I mumble a bit… so when I speak in public, I try to focus on projection and diction. Second, I listen to a lot of Canadian music. For no particular reason; it just so happens that a lot of my favorite artists are from there. You try listening to Jane Siberry for 28 years and see if her speech and diction patterns don’t infiltrate your head, too. (Not to mention all those prior years of fascination with The Smiths, UB40, and, when I was a kid, ABBA––not an American in the bunch.)

Put these things together (28 years of singing along to a quirky Canadian and attempting to focus on diction) and I am pretty sure this is the source of my apparently not-quite-American speech patterns. Or maybe it’s just that I was born on Canada Day. Nonetheless, I am pretty big on the Fourth of July, and the family will be coming to our house for the traditional cookout and for toasted marshmallows as the day closes, and come sunset, we will head to the lagoon to watch the municipal fireworks. And in pondering what or who should be the cover star of the Convivio Book of Days Calendar for July, it was a no-brainer: I went with something patriotic in honor of our nation’s 239th birthday. Click either of those two links above and you’ll have this month’s calendar, ready to print as a PDF document on standard US Letter size paper.

The image is from an old penny postcard from our collection. As the postcard says, 4th of July Greetings to you, and to yours. I wish you a month of wonderfully summery things.

It’s the First of the month and here we come bearing our monthly gift to you: the printable Convivio Book of Days Calendar, this one for June 2015. It is full-on summertime across the Northern Hemisphere, anyway you slice it: First day of summer by the almanac come the summer solstice, but for the more traditional amongst us, it is Old Midsummer come St. John’s Eve on the 23rd, just a couple of days past the solstice. We approach the longest days of the year now, but with St. John’s Day the earth again shifts in its seat and begins tilting back toward the south and these days that have been lengthening little by little with each passing day since the winter solstice begin again to get gradually shorter in our planet’s constant rearrange. Each day slightly different than the one that preceded it, slightly different than the one that follows.

You’ll find at this month’s calendar that things are pretty quiet for the first couple of weeks of June, and in that slower spirit of summer we have not rushed to get the calendar to you, but taken our sweet time. We encourage you, too, to put up the “Gone Fishing” sign on your door and spend some time enjoying life in the sunshine. Seth and I have taken some time off from work to paint the house, but we even took some time off from that yesterday, too, so we could get to the beach. It is the gentler time of year; you should enjoy it.

Instagram! We mentioned last month that we are now on Instagram, and it’s really proving to be a lot of fun. Please join us there in our little photobook project that covers seasonal traditions, foodways, book arts, occasional cats and gardens, Lake Worth living… the kind of eclectic rovings you’ve come to expect from us: https://instagram.com/conviviobookworks or just find us at the Instagram app at “conviviobookworks.”

Image: My mom Millie spending the day on the water sometime in the early 1950s. She is one of many family cover stars on this month’s Convivio Book of Days Calendar.