Cooling Off With Summer Books

Vogue 1930

Is it hot where you are this week?

I've got my beach hat on and am pretending to be in Cape Cod--the old uncrowded Cape Cod that I posted about on July 24, 2015 post.

My book bag holds the old-fashioned books of Cape Cod by Sara Ware Bassett. They may not be for everyone but if even one of you tries one for a summer read it will be worth the post. And you won't hurt my feelings if you scroll quickly through or exit altogether.

  
I found a couple of Bassett's books when antiquing years ago and have been adding to them. I've gathered some seaside props from around the house to make the pictures a little more interesting. 

I'll start with Bassett's final novel from 1957, The Girl in the Blue Pinafore.

As in each Bassett novel there is a love story and beautiful scenery that fulfilled my take-me-away to Cape Cod longings. Here's an autumn description dear to me because I would love to be there in autumn as well as summer.

The day was cool, the sea a somber blue ruffled by the east wind into white caps, but across the bronzed marshes the setting sun gilded the tips of the pines and turned to ruby the leaves that still clung to the oats, and the spire of the little white church to gold.

And there are good cooks in each book...

The chicken, broiled as only an experienced chef could broil it, was browned to a turn, the whipped potato a mound of snow, and fresh peas, jelly, and a bit of crisp parsley lent color to the white china edged with gold.

I don't know about you but that sentence rings my comfort-food bell. And all of the good cooks in Bassett's novels make delicious biscuit. Yes, biscuit, singular is also plural. I really like this odd detail from New England days past.

In Within the Harbor, from 1948, there is another description that made me want to be a citizen of the fictional Belleport.

 [My sister gave me this mermaid and since I pretend she's 

from Cape Cod I call her Madison.]

The sea, a deep sapphire, was ruffled just enough to be afoam with whitecaps, and along the dunes and edges of the small salt creeks the vivid marsh grass rippled in the wind. There was a clear, bracing tang in the air, and the sails of the boats scudding outside the harbor bellied white against the blue of the sky.

I've always longed to sail on a day like this. And there's something about marshland that whispers to me, as crazy as that sounds from the mountain girl that I am. And part of this Southern girl would also have been happy in a New England town of the 1940s and 50s.

From The White Sail of 1949 was such a small village.

 

A sun as bright as the treasure of Midas streamed down upon the village, gilding the ruffled surface of the sea and flooding every inlet that cut the shore with molten gold. The brown fields quickened beneath its warmth, it flooded with radiance the small white houses huddled about the bay, glistened on the cock that tipped the church steeple, turned to drifting splendor the smoke that streamed from the chimney.

And in the village a visitor came for refuge. The young woman went to work in a new shop where her job of transforming the old building fascinated me.

The rooms on the left and right of the hall had been tinted a warm creamy tone, the fireplace had been preserved, small-paned windows put in, and every suggestion she made incorporated. As for the hall, with its Dutch door and vista beyond, at which Myron Fletcher had jeered, even he was found to admit it was the glory of the house.

Hello! Instead of Lorna, our heroine, making it look like a store with shelves, it looked like a home, with pretty things displayed on tables, "scouring the antique shops...interesting prints, candlesticks, vases..."

Is this not a woman after your own heart?

Here's another capable New England woman in 1937's Shining Headlands.

  
I love the silver engraving on this oldest Bassett novel. Details like this enchant me. 

It is an old-fashioned story about a woman who is very nearly ready to be considered a spinster by the villagers. Thurza Bourne lives on the shore where a "little lane threaded its way in happy-go-lucky fashion down to the shore, wandering in and out of tangles of bayberry, sweet fern and wild roses." It was a place where artists came to paint.

Miss Thurza did not care to wed. She preferred to keep with her own hands the ordering of her life.

But on either side of her immaculate home live two men who hope Thurza will change her mind, one of whom would love to order her around, Luther, and one, Leander, who is perfectly happy to be ordered around himself.

1938's New England Born has a pretty dust jacket and book front.

Bassett often includes the same minor town characters over and over again in her books and many of them are the wise and droll New England characters that you'd expect. Abel is one of them.

Yes, as I said before, silence is golden. The man who's credited with knowin' all there is to be known under high heaven ain't the feller who prattles his knowledge. It's the one that shuts his mouth. He may be blessed with the wisdom of Solomon or he may be the biggest nincompoop alive, but so long as he seals his lips there's no earthly way of determinin' which he is.

Not bad advice from Uncle Abel, right?

In Head Winds, published in 1947, another uncle gives his niece advice.

You're a sensible girl an' have a sensible appetite. I've no patience with this notion some women have of livin' on an unbuttered eggshell until they shrink to a bag of bones. It makes 'em look scrawny an' twice their age, did they but know it. No woman who has a garden to take care of an' does her own housework need fret about her figger. 

I guess those of my readers here who do their own gardening can attest to Uncle Mac's dietin' advice.

The cover on 1953's The Whispering Pine, is my favorite.

I would have bought it for the cover alone. It takes place in Boston and rural Massachusetts instead of on Cape Cod. Two young women from Boston go exploring in the country where one of them ends up buying a house at a country auction just to save the large pine tree from being cut down by one man bidding. I always enjoy a novel where a house is transformed.

The gloomy brown paint was gone! Gone, too, the piazza with the jigsaw trimming which she had so spiritedly detested. Instead a charmingly quaint entrance with an arch for roses framed the doorway...the cottage now wore a coat of soft daffodil-yellow paint, a trim of white, and had green shutters which gave it style and character.

 If anyone is still around after this long book post you deserve a gold star! 

  Have any of you ever vacationed on Cape Cod? Please tell me about it!

Is there a certain place and time period that you love to read about? 

Any beach time planned this summer?

Stay safe and stay cool!

P.S. I'm so fond of this old glass block. If I had a house with a wall or window with ones like it, I'd never tear it down.

One client of ours wanted to keep the plain ones in her second floor bathroom remodel. Here's a pic of it after we installed the live edge counter slab she chose.

Would you have kept it?