RMW Ramblings

  Biking, Hiking, Running Three Books from the 1970s The 1970s saw a burst of books on energetic personal activities.  I was  long into bicycling, hiking, and morning runs, so I was enthusiastic over three books published that decade. The bicycle provided my geographic liberation and  teen employment in the early 1950s.  I bought a bicycle early on arrival for graduate school in Berkeley in 1960, and years later, when on an extended job remote assignment in Southern California, I bought a folding bike which I kept in the car trunk for spontaneous excursions. In 1970 Eugene Sloane's  The Complete Book of Bicycling  was issued.  It served me well when I commuted to work by bike during the energy crunch in the later '70s.     I cartooned myself in my '70s cycling.  My 1980s folding bike was a Hon, purchased at the Orange County Swap Meet, then a center of entrepreneurial upstarts. It folded compactly and fitted a carrying bag.  Ho...

  Pi Day 2026   Today is Pi (π) Day, 3.14 (March 14). This brings to mind Euler’s Identity which connects the five fundamental constants of mathematics.      The constants e, π, i (√-1), and 0 each have a biography in my library.    

    Mount Salem Lane   A New Homemade Book As a gift to our neighbors, I recently put together this little story about Mount Salem Lane and Mount Salem Church where it terminates. I composed it from some of the photos, maps, and other items that we have gathered over our decades here along with my memory of tales from earlier neighbors.   There are many gaps in the story and I may have gotten some dates and details wrong but I hope errors are minimal. Here's a peek inside...  About ten copies were printed, but you can view it in pdf form at  https://drive.google.com/file/d/16LC50ysk1CnftCTy7Tj7p33_ZGhGb6VU/view?usp=sharing

  A Homemade Pop-Up Book   Pop-up books are a Christmas tradition.  We have pop-up versions of  The Night Before Christmas,  Dickens'  A Christmas Carol,  and  The 12 Days of Christmas.  To add to our collection I made our own Christmas pop-up,  A Christmas Visit.   We'll page through it. The front cover ...  Front endpapers...     Title Page...     "The Walsh's house is very near," with Rockford Tower and Mount Salem Church popped up beyond our house...   "And through the transom we can peer," looking through a stained glass bordered transom window you can see the globe ceiling lamp in our library...         And now inside the library, "Peace, Joy, and Love are present here"...     "We must come back again next year"...   Back endpapers...   And back cover...   A detailed presentation of  "The Making of A Christmas Visit" is posted in my Google Drive at...

Obida A Homemade Memoir         For Christmas 2011, I wrote and printed a homemade book for my brothers and our family, "Obida." The book is a memoir intertwined with reminiscences of Obida, my grandmother and step-grandfather's isolated ocean front cottage in the 1940s & 50s. No plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, one room with a kitchen and sleeping porch. I illustrated it with sketches and a few old photographs. I made about ten copies in screw-post hard cover bindings. You can browse this book and some of my other homemade books on my Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/.../11rj35wgFYPpZvRrT4...  

  The Brothers Walsh A Short Homemade Book    In 2012 I read George Howe Colt's Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History,  a memoir of his family of four brothers with alternating chapters about well known brothers. the Kelloggs, the Van Goughs, the Booths, the Marx brothers. I loved the book and bought copies as Christmas presents for my brothers and supplemented it with a little homemade book, "The Brothers Walsh," my memoir of our family of six brothers. It was mostly text, illustrated by a few brother photographs.          

 Alaina's Book of Animals Another Handmade Book The books I have made as gifts, one-off or just a few copies range from mostly pictures to all text.  A mostly pictures one-off is a book I printed on Tyvek for Alaina's second birthday,   Alaina's Book of GrGrandad's Animals  is simply an assortment of some of my animal themed paintings with identifying labels. .  

AJ's Album A Little Homemade Book Last weekend was great-grandson AJ's first birthday.     I made him a little book with baby-proof Tyvek pages with comic book  style caricature sketches of four generations of our family.  Done with black Sharpie markers and colored digitally.   For AJ's big sister Alaina's first birthday in 2017 I made a book,  Bugs   & Such , a subject of several earlier postings.