Books about Hyacinth from Amazon.com

There are only 35 known Vermeers extant in the world today. In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland posits the existence of a 36th. The story begins at a private boys' academy in Pennsylvania where, in the wake of a faculty member's unexpected death, math teacher Cornelius Engelbrecht makes a surprising revelation to one of his colleagues. He has, he claims, an authentic Vermeer painting, "a most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." His colleague, an art teacher, is skeptical and though the technique and subject matter are persuasively Vermeer-like, Engelbrecht can offer no hard evidence--no appraisal, no papers--to support his claim. He says only that his father, "who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment." Eventually it is revealed that Engelbrecht's father was a Nazi in charge of rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation and that the picture was looted from one doomed family's home:

That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We'd almost missed him.

By the end of "Love Enough," this first of eight interrelated stories tracing the history of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," the painting's fate at the hands of guilt-riddled Engelbrecht fils is in question. Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the probable destiny of the previous owners, the Vredenburg family of Rotterdam, who take center stage in the powerful "A Night Different From All Other Nights." Vreeland handles this tale with subtlety and restraint, setting it at Passover, the year before the looting, and choosing to focus on the adolescent Hannah Vredenburg's difficult passage into adulthood in the face of an uncertain future. In the next story, "Adagia," she moves even further into the past to sketch "how love builds itself unconsciously ... out of the momentous ordinary" in a tender portrait of a longtime marriage. Back and back Vreeland goes, back through other owners, other histories, to the very inception of the painting in the homely, everyday objects of the Vermeer household--a daughter's glass of milk, a son's shirt in need of buttons, a wife's beloved sewing basket--"the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home." Girl in Hyacinth Blue ends with the painting's subject herself, Vermeer's daughter Magdalena, who first sends the portrait out into the world as payment for a family debt, then sees it again, years later at an auction.

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

In this final passage, Susan Vreeland might be describing her own masterpiece as well as Vermeer's. --Alix Wilber.
Price: $1.13 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Devlin Montebanc knows that a Victorian man needs a place to go, someplace he can be at ease, enjoying his port, his cigars, and some special male companionship That's why he maintains the Hyacinth Club, a traditional men's club with a twist. The sophisticated men of the Hyacinth Club find their pleasure in this series of bawdy tales. Each tale is full of heat and love, showing what those Victorians got up to behind closed doors. There's a Scottish earl, Low, who falls for Stephen, a Texas rebel. Low is determined to remain in control, but Stephen stirs his blood, and Low is constantly fighting his baser urges, only to give in to love. There's Caleb and Ethan, a pair of old friends who find each other again after years apart, playing an intimate game of one-upmanship. Bored noble Thaddeus finds innocent young scholar, Drummond, and instructs in the ways of dominance and submission. Even Devlin himself, who thinks he's too old and set in his ways for love, finds time to dally with his friends Repressed? I don't think so! Join the Hyacinth Club for a sexy romp through the Victorian era today!.
Price: $8.37 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The wastewater treatment processes described in this Manual of Practice (MOP) include soil-based and aquatic systems. The common element in all of these systems is the major contribution made by the "natural" environmental components, which provide the desired treatment. In general, these responses by the vegetation, soil, micororganisms (terrestrial and aquatic),and, to a limited extent, higher animal life proceed at their "natural" rates..
Price: $92.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From the Thames Foyer at the Savoy in London to the Essex Rose in Dedham, Loaves and Hyacinths: Tea Rooms in London and East Anglia tells the story of author Gladys S. Lewis and artist Norma K. Brown's journey to over fifty British tea rooms. Their pilgrimage resulted in the book Loaves and Hyacinths, which richly describes each tea room with graceful prose and over thirty color paintings Both author and artist found the perfect setting in the tea rooms to stop each day to take tea and to relax about life.

Tea rooms are a development of the last hundred years. In England, they have become an extension of the British economic and colonial involvment with the tea producing regions of the world. Volumes exist which take as subject coffeehouses, but little is recorded of tea rooms. The original ones were limited in appeal to women. They provided a place for afternoon tea and talk. Men remarked that more scandal originated in them than "hovered over the course of Good Queen Bess." The Tea room became the women's lodge, or the men's coffehouse counterpart.

The tea room made ints debut when restuarants had indifferent interiors and carelessly prepared food which was unattractively served. In contrast, tea rooms were small, snug and homely places. With the evolution of more substantial menus and the endurance of tea time, they have become centers for men as well as women. Tea rooms are not exclusivly British, but those encountered in England have a distinctive atmosphere. The principles of harmony, respect, purity of custom, and tranquility are present in the English tea room, and Loaves and Hyacyinths characterizes the uniqely British aesthetic experience. This is not a travel book, though Lewis and Brown crisscrossed the hamlets, villages, and towns of East Anglia. Neither is it a food critic's guide, though they ate in more than fifty tea rooms. Rather, the book highlights the journey to the social, historical, geographical, and literary environments and captures the essence of the renewing and relaxing experience of taking tea..
Price: $4.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]