The Dig Report: February 13th

 

I should have been in my glory.  The ad read "Estate Sale: Contents of old carriage house..."  I've learned not to get too excited, digs don't happen every weekend, and even when they do, if you're not the first one there, who knows what you may have missed.  But this image looks good. A big basement tables sagging in the middle from the pile of "stuff".  Upon closer inspection, there was a level of organization at work here that meant it would not be a "dig", or at least my kind of dig. 

 

Fortunately, I had my tag sale buddy with me.  This time I told her I'd pay her for her photographic skills. AVA took the job, and although her camera died (battery-munching 1st generation Kodak digital) she managed to take a really good picture (above). Nice grouping!  The house was a converted carriage barn and had a lot of charm, but not a lot of contents.  All the hardware was neatly organized and doubtfully was older than 10-15 years.  I found a few business cards that hinted there might have been an operation here older than the furniture recover/repair shop that this had been, but that had been moved or cleaned before this sale.  

Of the few books that filled a single case, I managed to find something that caught my eye:

The Famous Writers Course from the Famous Writers School in Westport, CT is something of a curiosity.  In an upcoming post I will describe the correspondence course in cartooning, which is from The Famous Artists School...guess where? The two are apparently unrelated, however the course look familiar in style and name. I have always been a fan of misleading advertising (gee Greg, can you narrow it down, a little?) and correspondence courses are full of it. I picked up the book because I like to write, and I was impressed by the writers who seem to be like faculty in the school, and are at least quoted, and interviewed in the book.

 

There was enough scandal and fact fudging going on at the "school" to fill a book this large with some good non-fiction. Take a look at the Wiki article that explains it all, here. It's a good story with an amazing number of possible duped students, and the best part is that somewhere down in Westport today, this book and its companions are still being sold as a course in writing.