(Roughly) Daily

Look, these days, I’ll take my cheering wherever I can get it. And this weekend, Ella Dickson put a smile on my face with her thread of book rocks, each one painstakingly painted to look like a novel. They are quite impressive, especially considering the uneven canvas. In 2018, Dickson, who is a math teacher at Beaumont School in St Albans, did a similar project with children’s books, but this summer, she’s used her isolation to whip up a crop of “some grown up books” to hide when libraries reopen. Because grown ups need wonder and discovery too!…

Via Emily Temple: “A math teacher has painted 45 book rocks to hide in her local library (when it reopens).”

* Isabel Allende

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As we extol Easter eggs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that William Sydney Porter was released (on good behavior) after serving three years in the Ohio Penitentiary for bank fraud and embezzlement; a licensed pharmacist, he had worked in the prison’s infirmary.  But on his release, he turned to what had been a pastime, writing.  Over the next several years he wrote 381 short stories under the pen name by which we know him, “O. Henry,” including a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine.

His wit, characterization, and plot twists– as evidenced in stories like “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief”– were adored by his readers but often panned by critics… though academic opinion has since come around: O. Henry is now considered by many to be America’s answer to Guy de Maupassant.

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