Writing from The Vespiary Book Restoration & Bindery

For years, William York Tindall's guide has been one of the very best ways to approach the difficult writing and complex language of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Over a period of forty years, Tindall studied, instructed, and most importantly, learned from graduate students about Joyce's greatest literary masterpiece.

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake ( James Joyce's masterwork that consumed a third of his life) have given up after a few pages and dismissed it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key"… Read more about this item

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and… Read more about this item

The grassroots publishing sensation continues with WOVEN ON THE WIND, the second volume of women's writing from the heart of the American West compiled by the editors and ranchers Linda Hasselstrom, Nancy Curtis, and Gaydell Collier. They called on women in sixteen states and provinces to write about their friendships with other women in the West, a subject that they… Read more about this item

The Last Best Place includes over 230 stories, poems, reminiscences, and reports written by 140 men and women. The book is divided into eight sections with introductory essays by William Bevis, Mary Blew, William Kittredge, William Lang, Richard Roeder, Annick Smith, and James Welch.

In Taking Care, William Kittredge relates his coming of age on a property his family transformed from a farm dependent on horses to a modern agribusiness. Painfully reflecting on the abandonment of old ways, Kittredge calls for new, radical stories about the West that will foster compassion and caretaking.

American's wisest, most prolific reader--and the "New York Times" bestselling author of "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human"--draws upon his more than 40 years as a college professor and critic to help readers attain a truly profound engagement with great literature.

Writing well does not result from following rules and instructions, but from a blend of spontaneity, judgment, and a wise attitude toward the work neither despairing nor defensive, but clear-eyed, courageous, and discerning. Writers must learn to tolerate the early stages, the dreamlike and irrational states of mind, and then to move from jottings and ideas to a messy first… Read more about this item

The only style manual ever to appear on bestseller lists has explained to millions of readers the basic principles of plain English. The books mantra "make every word tell" is still on point. Whether seventeen or seventy, this much-loved classic, now in its fourth edition, will forever be the go-to guide when in need of a hint on how to… Read more about this item

Steeped in the Palmer Method of Handwriting she learned in Catholic school, Kitty Burns Florey is a self-confessed "penmanship nut" who loves the act of taking pen to paper. So when she discovered that schools today forego handwriting drills in favor of teaching something called keyboarding, it gave her pause: "There is a widespread belief that, in a digital world,… Read more about this item

Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death.In these eloquent and surprising essays, twenty writers face this fact, among them Geoff Dyer, who describes the ghost bikes memorializing those who die in biking accidents; Jonathan Safran Foer, proposing a new way of punctuating dialogue in the face… Read more about this item