HEADS OR TAILS
suggests the word
'BOOK'
IT'S IN THE BOOK
A custom sadly lost.
*
The Family Bible
Contained
The Word Of God.
(So they said).
*
But, for me,
Its charm lay in
The Family Histories
On the fly-leaves.
*
I can click, of course.
I can peck my way
Through internet details.
*
But can any click
Bring the magic of faded ink?
*
The paper I touch,
Old, faintly dusty and perfumed by time,
Has been touched by the Writer!
That must mean something.
*
The shaky handwriting
Has come into being
At the behest of an old hand.
Even then
It must have been the elderly
Who cared about posterity.
*
The birth of the twelfth child!
The marriage of a spinster daughter!
The death of a Great Aunt!
Details
Recorded but once.
But for all time.
*
And, as they wrote
They saw themselves mirroring
The Hand of God himself,
Who was, at that moment,
Keeping his own records.
*
It said so
In The Good Book.
*
A Quote from Dickens
"Then he opened the book-case, and took down the great red Bible we have spoken of—a pompous book, seldom looked at, and shining all over with gold. There was a frontispiece to the volume, representing Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Here, according to custom, Osborne had recorded on the fly-leaf and in his large clerk-like hand, the dates of his marriage and his wife’s death, and the births and Christian names of his children. Jane came first, then George Sedley Osborne, then Maria Frances, and the days of the christening of each. Taking a pen, he carefully obliterated George’s names from the page; and when the leaf was quite dry, restored the volume to the place from which he had moved it."
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A dubious Family Record here:
8 comments:
Now that is a book to be treasured.
Good post. Somehow sitting in front of the computer doesn't take the place of curling up with a good book. I remember my Grandmother had a family bible like that with all the family births and deaths in it but it is somewhere in England.
Love the photo.
It's nice to have the bible as a guide in our lives! i have that in my entry too! nice post
http://www.horizonsweb.info/2009/09/two-important-books.html
so so true
My Great-Grandmother had a bible like this. My Grandmother started out in a bible then progressed to small date books and diaries. She could tell you the important dates in the life of any person she knew.
Calico Contemplations
yes and just like the custom so are the bibles I attend lots of auctions and you would not believe it but often the bible is auctioned as well
Just think how easily it was to erase that name out of the book. Too easy!
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