Picking a book because of its cover

Artist Paintbox
from a visit to an open studio

There's a reason for cover art and that's to entice us to pick the book up and give it a closer look. How did they do it in the old days when all the books were bound in leather with gold tooling on the spine one looking pretty much like every other one? I imagine the quintessential Englishmen's library as featured in movies and design magazines.  I love strolling among the shelves looking for something that peaks my interest.

There are other methods to searching cover art for inspiration like flipping through BookPage: America's Book Review so thoughtfully left in the teacher's workspace by our wonderful school librarian. Her ploy is to get teachers to help with providing suggestions for the school catalogue, but I use it for my personal reading gain. There it was on the page, a cover featuring an open watercolor palette and brush, Julia Glass's A House Among the Trees.

Mort Lear, famous illustrator and children's book author, has foolishly, especially at his advancing age, climbed up onto the roof to clean away some debris left by a storm, only to fall to his death. His long time, live-in personal assistant Tomasina (Tommy) Daulair has inherited the house along with the responsibility of managing his literary/artistic estate. Enter a small cast of characters whose lives have been touch some way or another by Mort and his artwork. There is Meredith a museum curator to whom Mort as promised to donate a large portion of his work upon his death; Franklin his lawyer; Nick the actor who is to play Mort in a biopic movie; and Dani, Tommy's younger brother, who unwittingly served as the model for Mort's breakout work. It is through these people that we learn about Mort's character and his past. He presented a different face to each of them as he worked hard to hide his real self.

Mort, like many, suffered a trauma in his childhood which he never spoke about and kept hidden. The keeping of secrets leads one to develop mechanisms to protect the self, and prevent the rest of the world from knowing the truth. We are afraid that the world will not understand. They will judge us harshly regardless of the fact that we are a victim and not the perpetrator. As a result we become stunted. It is only by Mort's death and the coming together of this small group of characters that we can come to know the real Mort, and the truth is the real Mort lost out on a lot of life by holding onto his secrets. Finding the courage to voice our secrets allows us to be freed of them thereby giving us the opportunity to use all the energy that was dissipated in keeping those secrets and channel it into living more fully.