A year… five years, and thirty-three years, in the making
Back on December 19, 2021, we celebrated a pretty significant anniversary… five years since our Butterfly-in-Chief survived a stroke. Which got us thinking about how much had changed in those five years… and the last two… and this last year, the first year of the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities.
Stroke-A-Versary greetings via text!
Chief Alien: Happy Stroke-A-Versary! I continue to be delighted that you remain on this side of the equation.
Butterfly-in-Chief: THANK YOU!! I’ve been contemplating how I want to celebrate today since it is my FIFTH Stroke-A-Versary :)
Chief Alien: Holy crap. It’s been that long?
And it also got us thinking about the thirty-three years of books and friendship upon which this institution has been built.
We’ve touched on a few things in past posts about our origins, but this seemed like a good moment to take a bit of a deeper dive.
But then we kind of realized this whole library is our deeper dive.
We’ve talked about about how our shared – and back in the day, rather unusual – love of books like Dune, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started our friendship.
We’ve touched on conversations and debates we’ve been having for years: the freedom to read, mental health, our love of libraries.
This past year has also given us a chance to do deeper dives into a couple of favourite topics… things that, if given half the chance, we will talk your ear off about… and this library gave us more than half a chance: small presses and the book as object.
In the past five years, there have been new jobs and whole new careers, new friendships and new relationships, new opportunities to learn and new opportunities to apply what we’ve learned. Five-years-ago us had NO idea.
And thirty-years-ago us… thirty-years-ago us were babies and what did we know then anyways?
Well, we knew what we liked to read, and we guess that was a pretty great place to start.
So since we started this post talking about death and mortality, we thought we’d close on the same topic, expanding on a line from our earlier post about our Head Alien’s collection of funny books about death. That original “one book of cartoons about unpleasant ways to die” was the result of a three hour road trip, basically just to go visit a cool used bookstore that our Butterfly-in-Chief had found in Calgary. It was possibly even our first of many such road trips. And it found our Head Alien laughing uncontrollably in the middle of the store, reading Unpleasant Ways to Die by Elan Fleisher, possibly while wearing a black trenchcoat and looking a bit like Death himself.
That same trip and that same store, our Butterfly-in-Chief found a gorgeous facsimile copy of the 1909 J. M. Dent’s & Sons edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley… a thematic connection we may have only just noticed now.
And then was spoken the phrase that could well be the unofficial motto of our friendship and this library, since then said so many times and so many ways, the summation of the terrible/fabulous influence we have been in each other’s lives: “Well you’ve gotta buy that book…”
Le Morte D’Arthur’s dust jacket is rough and there is scuffing on the bottom of the hardcover from sliding it in and out of the book shelf. It has been well ogled. Unpleasant Ways to Die is falling apart from repeated visits, missing part of its spine and with pages coming loose inside.
Signs of a life well lived and well loved, and with plenty of life still to come!
All that to say, from all of us here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, carpe diem and happy reading!
– Stacey and Winston
