Library Blog

A Busy Day on Main Street

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Liam Guthrie, Regional History Librarian

A busy street of cars, pedestrians, and horses in winter.
Gold Mine Collection, Jeanne Rodger Lane Center for Regional History (F 08422)

It can be easy to imagine the past as a quieter, emptier place sometimes, and in some places it certainly was. But this photograph of Ketchum’s Main Street circa 1938 definitively shows that Ketchum was not one such place. The street is teeming with pedestrians even on a cold winter day. A policeman directs the flow of cars entering the crowded road. A couple men appear to be ski joring ­—­ skiing while being pulled by horses — down the middle of the road as onlookers watch on. It certainly is a lively scene.

The buildings and stores lining Main Street also tell a great story of 1930’s Ketchum. Lane Mercantile and Griffith Brothers Grocery call back to the town’s pre-Sun Valley ranching roots. Clubs and casinos like The Alpine Café and Bar, The Sawtooth Club, and Frontier Casino show the thriving gambling scene in Ketchum, driven by the wealth flowing into Sun Valley in droves. Meanwhile the Conoco and the Westcott Oil Co. gas and service stations speak to the growth of the automobile occurring across the country in this time period. Other buildings lining Main street include hotels, a sporting goods store, and a laundry.

Every inch of this photograph is rich with detail, each telling its own story about Ketchum’s history: The men leaning over the false front of The Alpine’s roof. The woman crossing the street, pulling her jacket closed against the cold. The cars stopped on the opposite end of the street as crowds of people, and a dog, walk across. Each is its own vignette of life in Ketchum in 1938.

It is likely that many in this crowd have bets on the skiers about to race down the middle of main street, eagerly awaiting the result. It is just as likely that the people waiting in their cars are annoyed at the stoppage and eager to be on their way. Still others may just be trying to cross the street and get their weekend shopping done. Afterall, the people in this photo ultimately aren’t all that different from us today.

Note this story was originally published in September of 2024 in the Idaho Mountain Express.

What’s in a Library Collection?

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By Collections Manager Aly Wepplo

I love my library and I love books.

Working in The Community Library, I get a lot of requests for what’s new and next in the world of reading:  

  • “Emily Henry’s next one comes out in October – put me on hold!”  
  • “I just finished the last Daniel Silva – when is the next one out?”  
  • “Did you hear? There’s a new Malcolm Gladwell!”  
Aly Wepplo and patron Joyce Patricelli
Aly and patron Joyce Patricelli discuss books in the New Books Nook.

Since the Library posted our online acquisition request form to our website last Fall, we have received about 800 requests. That’s 73 a month, 17 a week, or three a day. And that’s just what we collect online!  

All these requests mean our shelves hold something for everyone. We’re building the library’s collection together.  
  
As Collections Manager, I love hearing your requests. I also look to library trade publications for the latest in book news – I never miss Booklist, Library Journal, and Kirkus, all of which you can read online. I consult reviews from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and People Magazine, all of which are available to read in the library. And I love the email newsletters from Book Riot and Publishers Weekly.  

But personal recommendations are my favorite.

They make me feel in-the-know and connected to the community. Earlier this month, I received patron requests for The New Whole30 and Beyond Paradise Season 2, which I hadn’t realized were available yet. And of course, I’m always filling my to-read list with recommendations from coworkers, like the new kids’ fantasy Impossible Creatures, recommended by Children’s Librarian DeAnn Campbell and the indie bestseller Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, recommended by Director of Programs and Education Martha Williams.  

Where do you get your book recommendations? Let us know in the comments!  

Book Review: When we Cease to Understand the World

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Children’s Librarian Judy Zimmer recommends When we Cease to Understand the World by Labatut Benjamin.

I found this audio book – historical fiction translated from Spanish – while browsing Libby, not at all sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. It’s fast paced, fascinating and I didn’t want to stop listening!

Labatut Bejamin blends fact and fiction seamlessly.

It tells the story of four Nobel Prize winning scientists and mathematicians whose discoveries have had profound effects on humanity. Some for the good and some that have caused pure misery. These four scientists are people whose names I’d never heard of before:

 Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger. These geniuses paid a personal price, even losing their sanity in their pursuit to understand the world.

Find it in our Collection here.

Hemingway’s Grave: A Year of Offerings

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August-November 2024
Library Foyer

The Community Library featured a Foyer exhibit that displayed objects collected from the gravesite of Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 in his home in Ketchum, Idaho.* He was buried in the Ketchum Cemetery and his funeral ceremony was attended by close friends and family.

Ernest Hemingway's Funeral 1961
Photo: Center for Regional History, Hemingway Collection

Curated by prominent Broadway director Les Waters, Hemingway’s Grave: A Year of Offerings, brought together select tokens from hundreds that were left at Ernest Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum over the course of one year. The exhibit featured all the liquors bottles left there, plus the coins and paper money, an assortment of ephemera, a rose, and a deeply personal letter.

Waters also selected items he found most interesting, and surprising, for the exhibit, including a brand-new red lipstick, a fly-fishing lure, a bullet casing, a shiny silver bracelet, and a cat collar. These are displayed in a collection with other ephemera found at the gravesite. One of the most poignant items left behind was a letter from a woman who found encouragement and hope in Hemingway’s work during in a particularly difficult period of her life.

Hemingways grave for website

Liquor bottles, coins, and paper bills were among the most common items left at Ernest Hemingway’s gravesite over the course of one year.

Ernest Hemingway’s Final Refuge 

Hemingway Portrait by Yousef Karsh 1957
Portrait by Yousef Karsh, 1957

Ernest Hemingway died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. He had been coming to Idaho for twenty-two years, when he was at the height of his literary powers and when he was his most vulnerable. He developed deep friendships here, and he had an abiding affection for the landscape.   

Hemingway is buried in the Ketchum cemetery, now surrounded by the gravesites of his immediate family members and close friends. His gravesite has become a pilgrimage site, and many people leave offerings at his grave. The objects accumulate daily, throughout all the seasons.  

In September 2022, the theater director Les Waters came to Ketchum through the Sun Valley Playwright’s Residency to collaborate with monologist David Cale on Blue Cowboy, a piece about Ketchum,  a dog, a certain cowboy, and the annual Trailing of the Sheep.  

Waters knew little about Ketchum before that visit—only that people skied here, that Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich were associated with the town; that perhaps a famous writer lived and died here. . . . While he was in Ketchum, Waters visited Hemingway’s gravesite, and he became fascinated by the tokens that people left there and what they might represent.  

Waters was inspired to develop a project with The Community Library (with the permission of the Ketchum Cemetery) to collect and log these objects over the course of one year. He did so with the help of local literary scholar Lauren Allan, who also worked on the Hemingway Letters Project. Over one year, hundreds of objects were collected from the gravesite of this complex man who shaped modern literature. 

The exhibit, Hemingway’s Grave: A Year of Offerings, presents a collection of these tokens. It will be on display in the Library’s Foyer through December 2024.

*The Historic Ernest Hemingway House and Preserve, which Ernest shared with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, is managed by The Community Library Association as a private residence for visiting writers, and the site of ongoing preservation efforts.

Book Review: Moonwalking with Einstein

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Collections Manager Aly Wepplo recommends Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. 

Aly Wepplo Moon Walking with Einstein

In August, I performed in Laughingstock Theater’s production Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. For that job, I memorized a script of about 100 pages – no small feat! And I remembered that memorization is an amazing thing. It is both a game and a challenge. And it is the topic of the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. 

In one year, author Joshua Foer went from covering the U.S. Memory Championship as a journalist to winning the event. His book details how he studied with the world’s most accomplished memorizers and learned their strategies to remember lists of phone numbers, digits of pi, and lines of verse.

In the process, Foer learned that memory is a muscle. It can be trained and improved. And it works best with information that can be visualized.

So, for example, it might seem impossible to remember the order of a deck of cards, but it gets a little easier when each card is attached to an outlandish image – like a moonwalking Einstein wearing four spades as shoes, the king of hearts on his face, and three diamonds on his driving gloves. 

“Wait!” you object, “That still sounds incredibly complicated!” And maybe it is. But it’s an effective tool for connecting long lists of things we want to remember. And it’s a fun peek into how memory champions use their brains. 

Know of any other great books about memorization? Share them with us! Recommend a title for our collection here. 

Find Moonwalking with Einstein in our Collection here.

Book Review: North Woods

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Librarian Andrea Nelson recommends North Woods by Daniel Mason.

           …And now for something completely different.

~Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1971

It’s difficult to capture the essence of Daniel Mason’s North Woods in a single book review. Never before have I read a book as impossible to pigeonhole as this brilliant, multi centennial saga inspired by the crumbling stone remains of a long-gone New England house.

When North Woods arrived at our library in 2023, the first thing that jumped out at me was its strange cover art. It is hard to look away from the over-saturated drawing of a “catamount” lounging on a hillside. There is a strangely human quality about its face, and the perspective is all wrong. It could be the cover of a children’s book on apex predators. There, half buried in a pile of intriguing new library arrivals, North Woods all but shouted, “Look at me! I am different!”

Invoking “librarian’s privilege,” I snatched it up and began flipping through the pages before it even hit the shelves. What I found was a visual Easter egg hunt. Small, archival treasures peeked out from between the chapters. Faded pencil drawings perch off-center on otherwise blank pages, grainy antique photos of long-gone forest scenes, old-fashioned poems and ballads, odd proverbs, a sheet of music, a page from a Farmer’s Almanac, a hand drawn map, news clippings…

Daniel Mason clearly liberated these little bits of history from dusty Massachusetts archival files while doing his book research. He uses them to signal the passage of time and transition between his storylines. It is refreshing, to say the least– this use of multimedia. It draws the eye to the book like beads woven between the scenes of a pictorial tapestry, adding texture to the book’s astonishing, genre-defying originality.

Without a doubt, North Woods is something completely different.

Pulitzer Price Finalist Daniel Mason is a master of literary voice. Fittingly, the novel begins in elated, almost musical prose, capturing the spirit of two young lovers fleeing their oppressive Puritan colony to brave life together in the wilderness. Their joyful escape takes them deep into the wooded foothills in Western Massachusetts, an area now called the Berkshires. The brave couple could not have imagined that for over four hundred years to follow, the sun-dappled forest clearing they chose for their home would shelter generations of future families, adventurers, villains, artists, sheep, a cougar, and an ever-growing cast of resident ghosts.

As in life, the book begins with beauty and hope, but the decades march on. The house in the North Woods sees residents come and go, nurturing brand-new dreams, facing daunting challenges, and enduring a panoply of tragic losses, bitter feuds, intriguing mysteries, transcendental love and searing heartbreak.

These are the things that define humanity. Perhaps in the North Woods, these things remain after mortality ends, swirling like mist among the stone ruins that dot the New England landscape. As any New Englander can tell you, every mossy, vine-covered, stone relic has a story to tell. 

Whether the protagonist is an elderly British soldier in search of the perfect wild apple tree, or a giddy chestnut blight spore tumbling and dancing on the wind, each chapter of North Woods perfectly reflects the tone of its human or non-human protagonists’ personality. Daniel Mason catapults his readers from a poetic, whimsical story of young love to the violent realism of historical fiction during the bloody French and Indian Wars… and that’s only in the first two chapters. Expect a little whiplash! Some chapters read like psychological thrillers, burning with jealousy, axe murders, passion, deceit, and thwarted love. Others provide comic relief. Some are deliciously spooky, full-on embracing the haunted house sub-genre, while others teach us forestry, entomology, and the pros and cons of importing Spanish sheep. One particularly steamy chapter reads like an excerpt from a romance novel hot enough to make Helen Huang blush—and its two lust-struck protagonists are none other than Scolytid beetles.

Many colorful characters pass through the house in the North Woods over time. An evil southern bounty hunter tracks an escaped slave there, a psychiatrist visits a tragic mother and her schizophrenic son, an escaped convict, a true crime journalist, and an obsessive, disgraced member of the Historical Society of Western Massachusetts all add to its mosaic. Finally, more than four hundred years after the young lovers fled their Puritan colony, a young graduate student travels to the clearing hoping to study spring ephemerals that grow near the now barely visible ruins of the old, forgotten homestead.

I won’t spoil the end for you, but I assure you, you are in for a wild ride.

Find in print, CD, ebook, and eAudiobook in our Collection here.

North Woods is the selection for The Community Library’s Book Club on Wednesday, October 2, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. More here.

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