What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-à-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.

A collection of 60 short prose pieces by best-selling author and design critic Akiko Busch that reflect, in her classic style of observation, on the human condition and offer insights on family, domestic space, and a changing environment. Beautifully illustrated with 20 pieces of watercolor art, this collection makes an inspirational gift. In Everything Else Is Bric-a-Brac, Akiko Busch explores place, memory, and the ambiguities of domestic life. At once thought-provoking, humorous, and meditative, these essays illuminate the emotional resonance of inanimate things; ideas of placement and displacement; the simultaneous frailty and tenacity of human recollection; the beauty of usefulness and uselessness alike; and how we do—and don't—find our place in things.

This book is a collection of poems written shortly after I suffered my second stroke. It is about the things that matter to me, (family), and things that interest me, (gardening, cowboy life, nature). As well it is about my search for answers in my own life. I feel as if I had been writing this book in one way or another for most of my adult life.