Back to some sort of normality

 After our mad dash out west last week we slipped back in to a more normal routine this week, with a productive day down at Lake View working on the books used to 'dress' the sitting room and the anecdotal observation that works of devotional literature were far less worn than the popular literature of the day, suggesting that they were far less read.

I took advantage of my work with the Athenaeum's heritage book collection, which reflects the actual tastes of reading room subscribers in Stanley in the late Victorian period to suggest that sensation novels and the like were far more popular than more pious literature.

As I pointed out, this can present a curatorial problem when 'dressing' a house for display - it is tempting to produce a display featuring well preserved items of devotional literature than the battered and tattered copies of 'Little Women' and 'The Woman in White', which more closely reflect the literary taste of the times.

I also mentioned last week that some of the items I'd catalogued at Lake View included some moral works by Hannah More that appeared little read.

While certainly the case there's possibly an interesting story here.

The books in question were printed by Thomas Tegg in London, and I'd vaguely assumed that they'd come out as part of an order from a London bookseller in a sort of nineteenth century version of Amazon, but they could potentially have been sold in Sydney, as Thomas Tegg's son, James Tegg, was a bookseller (and later a printer and publisher in his own right) in Sydney, and I'm guessing that James Tegg bought them from his father as stock for his bookshop,

After last year's possum trouble, I started off my tomatoes on the enclosed part of the back deck used as a cat run, and planted them out this week as they'd grown to a possum proof size.

This has left me with a problem - the first part of October was cold and I held off buying zucchini plants, but when I went down to the local hardware store earlier this week to see if they had any left they were completely out, so I've ended up planting some standard commercial seed in pots in the hope they'll germinate and I can plant out some late zucchini early next month.

(Normally I buy some plants from a local nursery plus try some organic varieties grown with seed bought online, with mixed results - the organic seed can have a low germination rate, possibly due to our tendency to have decidedly cold nights well into spring, while the bought plants initially struggle, perhaps because I don't properly harden them off.)

I didn't plant any potatoes this year, which was possibly a mistake but our dill, basil and chives are doing well. The broad beans took a terrific battering during the dress rehearsal for Ragnorok a couple of weeks ago and have not recovered, so I'm afraid we're going to have a fairly meagre crop this year.

Still, that's gardening ...