a smile for the new year

This little bookcase without many books has been sitting in this location since I moved upstairs in 2016 when Jeanette moved in downstairs. It had been out on the upstairs landing where it accumulated a variety of things, from old lace from grandmother's stuff to Aunt Dora's velvet-cased opera glasses to cups of pens and pencils to old eyeglass cases to miscellaneous parts for massage equipment. And a couple-three books. I thought (without thinking new year's resolution) that it was time to toss the detritus and take care of the good stuff. I picked up one of the books, plain medium blue hardbound, and opened it. It was the 1931 (4th) edition of Enduring passion: further new contributions to the solution of sex difficulties being the continuation of Married love by Marie Carmichael Stopes.

Mrs Stopes's book Married love comes up twice during Downton Abbey: once when Mrs Hughes's familiarity with Mrs Stopes's Married love is used to squelch Edna's tale of being pregnant (Season 4) and again when Anna helps Mary with birth control when she's off for an adventure with Gillingham (Season 5). I don't remember knowing about Mrs Stopes before Downton Abbey but my dad did have some book on married love that he shared at some point in my youth. I remember the book not looking very sensational and this book I came across today does not look very sensational either.

As I thumbed through Enduring passion, I noticed there was a newspaper clipping that had significantly foxed a couple pages in the "The 'change' in women" chapter (that chapter just precedes the one on "The 'change' in men"). The clipping looked a bit like the New York times and is headlined "'Liberty' heading for San Francisco." A production of Austin Strong's play "which has knocked for several years on Broadway's door" was headed for a production in San Francisco, to be produced by Catherine Sibley and Richard Aldrich and perhaps to star Pierre Fresnay (Lafayette), Olivia de Haviland (Mme Lafayette), and Charles Waldron (Washington). Cannot help but think of Hamilton with those characters.

The clipping is missing any date or context but I googled what I had and found the text in the New York times for January 19, 1939. The headlines in the version online are different perhaps indicating varying editions of the paper. The article is in the Amusements section. There is an "L" near the page number which may indicate the Late edition.

All this made me smile. I just turned over the clipping. Oh. The article on the verso is headlined "Birth control rift ended by merger." This turned the smile into a chuckle. That clipping made perfect sense. Now I wish that there was a sign of whose book this had been. Gram and Aunt Dora's folks had both died by 1939. Both Gram and Aunt Dora were widows in the late 1930s. It is possible that the book has not been in the family house all along. It may take longer to clear off that bookshelf than I imagined.