Books about Yesteryear from Amazon.com

Myrtle Scharrer Betz is a born storyteller with a marvelous tale to tell. Her account of growing up on Caladesi Island is one of the richest portraits available of life in Florida when it truly was the natural, tropical paradise that tourists and residents alike can only dream of discovering today.Told with compelling honesty and humanity, this tale by the only child ever born on Caladesi Island captures the natural wonders, discomforts, challenges, and joys of pioneer life on a Florida West Coast barrier island, spanning the time from when her father, Henry Scharrer, first arrived in America from Switzerland in 1883 until his death in 1934.This new and enlarged edition includes more than 130 historic illustrations providing a visual legacy to complement Myrtle s narrative, and granddaughter Terry Fortner has added a timeline to clarify the history, extending to the years before and after the narrative itself.With wisdom, insight, and poetry, Myrtle Sharrer Betz has written a book that is sure to become a Florida treasure. In consideration of the future as well as preservation of the past, sales from the book support the Henry Scharrer Memorial Fund to underwrite projects at Caladesi and Honeymoon Island State Parks..
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Since the early nineteenth century women have been using their fabric collections to make quilts, often using thousands of pieces in a single quilt. These feats of perseverance and art were newsworth and in towns across the United States they caught the attention of the local press, which recognized the women and their work. This book gathers these newspaper accounts of industrious needlework into a chronicle of the work. Arranged chronologically, the reports are accompanied by detailed photographs of quilts made during the same time period. This visual record of the antique quilts make it clear how painstaking and beautiful was the quiltmaker's work, and why it attracted attention. Aficionados of women's history, textile history and quilt history will gain valuable insights into the quiltmakers' dedication to their minute work, and the esteem in which their communities held them. Quilt historians and all who cherish the art of the quilt will gain a new understanding of the quilts and the people who made them..
Price: $17.13 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From the early 1880s through the second quarter of the twentieth century, American women made crazy quilts in colossal numbers. The velvets, satins, silks, wools and cottons of the crazy quilt era reflect abundance in the economy of the society-at-large. Just as they filled their scrapbook albums with trade cards, calling cards, photos and memorabilia, crazy quilt makers embellished their quilts with their most favorite things. The result was newsworthy...literally. Newspapers picked up on the accomplishments of these talented women and shared them with their communities. This new book contains over 200 newspaper articles dating from 1880 to 1945, that trace crazy quilt patterns and articles in women's magazines and pamphlets. The fascinating text is illustrated with quilts that are contemporary to the source articles. All of the pictures are close-ups, showing intricate piecing and extensive embellishment. This unusual book enriches the history and appreciation of the quilt as art..
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These casual quilts are inspired by the past but rely on simplified techniques for today's quilter Each quilt spotlights reproduction-style fabrics that instantly give designs an old-time look.

• Ten lap- and wall-quilt patterns feature the classic colors of vintage quilts

• Snap-to-stitch projects include seasonal and everyday themes

• Traditional blocks are updated with modern sewing methods.
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Gregor von Rezzori, who came from an old aristocratic family, was born in Czernowitz, an erstwhile provincial capital of the of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine), a place that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of wild human diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.

At the heart the book is a series of portraits, variously intimate, humorous, loving, and appalling, of von Rezzori’s dysfunctional family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by her marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid Cassandra, who introduced him as a boy to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy, the sometime companion of Mark Twain. Telling their stories, von Rezzori tells his own, holding up his early life like a crystal to the light, examining and reexamining its facets and making it shine for us with a prismatic brilliance..
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