countryside companion

June 21, 2011

I found this old book at our local book fair, and had to buy it after peeking inside. It's called the Countryside Companion (published 1846 by Odhams Press, London, and edited by Tom Stephenson.) Can you imagine, writing a book, and having each page so beautifully illustrated? The page-borders are populated with swallows and willows, owls and waterlilies. The writing itself is sometimes overblown and pompous, and revels in British nationalism but I suppose it is a product of its time and place. I will keep enjoying it for the photography and artwork, for sure.

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18 responses to “countryside companion”

Margaret Oomen

June 21, 2011

the photographs and illustrations are wonderful
you could always paint over the words if you wanted to

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Hadley

June 21, 2011

Gorgeous. I wonder if it was a large publisher or a small art-house.

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Francesca

June 21, 2011

oh, gorgeous!

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Miss Pip

June 21, 2011

Oh my goodness. That is exquisite.
It is difficult to grapple with the idea that something so outwardly beautiful has some darker themes to it. I find the same complications in music.

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Lucille

June 21, 2011

I have the same book but with a different dust jacket portraying an English village. It’s a reprint from 1947 and has a wonderful section on camping and caravanning.

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Mar Ruiz

June 21, 2011

It is really especial!!!

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Dorien Ruben

June 21, 2011

Those illustrations are wonderful 🙂 Great find!

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Nicole

June 22, 2011

What a fantastic find. I like Margie’s idea of “recycling” it.

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Charis

June 22, 2011

Gorgeous illustrations… it’s only ever kids books that tend to be illustrated now!

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Denise | Chez Danisse

June 22, 2011

A wonderful object.

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brooke

June 22, 2011

It is beautiful and reminds me of an illustrated manuscript. I wonder what the author was like to plan such a lovely book.

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Jennifer Lin

June 22, 2011

Oh. It is so nostalgically whimsical & gorgeous! You hardly see books with such illustrations rendered with such love & care. What a wonderful find!

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rachelle

June 23, 2011

A great find. Lots of inspiration for stitcheries. Love Margies idea to recycle too. x

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Lyndy

June 23, 2011

What a gorgeous book! I love vintage books.

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Rebecca

July 6, 2011

I love old nature books. They are such fun to look through. I found some wild-flower and wild-tree guides that belonged to my aunt when she was little. The pictures were lovely.

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Kevin

August 15, 2018

I read it as a kid. It’s a wonderful snapshot of Britain immediately after WW2 – though I wasn’t aware of that at the time – practically a love letter to the landscape and wildlife of Britain, and an exhortation to its readers to explore their island. Sadly some of the species it mentions, like the Large Tortoiseshell butterfly, are now extinct in the UK. 😦
I’m not sure which of my parents originally owned it, but I suspect my father. As a lad he bicycled miles from his home exploring little known areas. Apparently he could be anywhere in a 50 mile radius from home. Eventually, in the late 40s, he decided to go further afield and bicycled around France, which was highly unusual in those days. 🙂 Reading it sparked up my interest in wildlife, old crafts, and weather lore. As for exploring – well I seem to have my father’s penchant for that. My daughter seems to have inherited it as well. 🙂
One of the things you’ll notice in pictures of villages – no street lights. They didn’t advance out into the country until later. In fact some places didn’t get electricity until very late. I was talking to an old woman in our village who remarked that they were still using paraffin lamps and gas lighting up until the 60s. Apparently folks often went to bed not long after it got dark. The elderly woman living next door still does.

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tinyhappy

August 15, 2018

Lovely reflections, thank you!
– Melissa

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Kevin

August 15, 2018

I’m just reading through it now. It’s a world that’s gone, and much else with it. The elms have gone, countless species have dropped in number or are endangered, even once common species such as starlings and sparrows have been hit, nearly all of the the rural crafts mentioned have gone, mixed farming has gone – the list goes on. 😦 I for one have never heard a nightingale, and it is 50 years since I last heard a cuckoo.
That’s what’s happened in the 70 years since the book was written. The impact is even more noticeable if you read Furneaux’s book on British butterflies and moths, printed in 1910 (beautiful plates BTW). He remarks, for example, that Hummingbird hawkmoths are too common to need description. I’ve never seen one in the wild. 😦 Round here, in rural Derbyshire, I found various species missing, although their larval foodplants were in abundance – the Common Blue butterfly, for example, though the older folk tell me that it was once common here. I’ve been reintroducing some species, including the Common Blue. Meanwhile the population of rabbits has crashed, and it’s not due to myxamatosis.
Wildlife has been hit largely by changes in farming practices and habitat fragmentation, plus changes in the seasons. I spend a lot of time on the land, so I tend to notice that things are – drifting.
I recall my father saying that as a lad, the fields he roamed in were full of clouds of butterflies. I’ve noticed the number of butterflies and bees have dropped considerably since I was a lad, and they weren’t at the level they were when he was young. When I was a kid summer was full of noticeable lazy buzzings from flowers. It was a general background noise of summer if you were in the garden. It was still like that in my teens and 20s in the 70s. Not these days, despite us having a smallholding and doing our damndest to support the local butterflies and bees, including putting out a container of damp soil for butterflies to drink from in the recent heatwave (yes, butterflies get thirsty as well – we had gangs of them drinking). Well, they’re pollinators, so we want every pollinator we can draw to us to pollinate the crops. Despite our efforts there’s a fraction of the insects that there used to be and should be, even though our place looking to the casual observer like a wildlife paradise compared to most places. 😦 We’ve even had bats living over the kitchen. 🙂

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