We’re so excited about Ree Drummond’s visit to the bookstore today!
Here’s everything you need to know.
At 5:00 Ree will sign her new kids book Charlie Goes to School in the bookstore. She will also sign any of her Pioneer Woman books which we also have for sale.
At about 5:30, she will read Charlie Goes to School in our Dot Com events building (adjacent to Banner Hall). You can also get your books signed after the reading/talk.
You may have heard that Lemuria Books is publishing a photographic coffee table book called Jackson: Crossroads of the South by Ken Murphy. Needless to say, we’re thrilled. The goal of this project is to capture what Jacksonians value, enjoy and find beautiful about our city. Ken has spent the last six months on a photo shoot in Jackson. The book will go on sale in May/June of 2014 and will contain approximately 160 photos of Jackson.
We thought this book was so special that we didn’t want to keep it all to ourselves. So John Evans, owner of Lemuria, came up with the idea to allow Jackson businesses to sell the book as well. We think of this book as more than just a book. It is a product for Jackson about Jackson. We hope everybody will be proud of it. We encourage all local retailers to have this Jackson product/book for sale on their counters. We feel small business is an overlooked yet key component to preserving Jackson’s vitality.
There are two ways you can sell Jackson: Crossroads of the South at your business.
1. You can buy one or more boxes—with 10 books in each box—with the standard dust jacket. The above dust jacket is our standard “working” dust jacket.
2. You can buy 10 or more boxes of the book and have the opportunity to have your very own customized dust jacket. Ken Murphy will photograph your business for the cover. These orders must be placed by November 1, 2013.
For more details on wholesaling Jackson, click here: Jackson Crossroads of the South Wholesale Information
All retailers are invited to an exclusive sneak peek and talk with Ken Murphy on Monday, September 30 at 6:00 at the LemuriaBooks.com Building (adjacent to Banner Hall).
Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. Please join us in celebrating Jackson on August 5th at 5:00 in Banner Hall!
This month marks the release of Robert Khayat’s memoir The Education of a Lifetime. To kick it off, we’re having a little fun with this quiz. Anyone who answers every question correctly will be eligible to win an Advance Reader’s Copy of The Education of a Lifetime, as well as a copy of the brand new photo book, Ole Miss: A Photographic Essay (on sale October 5).
Submit your answers in the comments section below. We’ll notify the winner via e-mail.
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1. What grade did Robert Khayat’s receive in Chemistry (his first class at Ole Miss) in the Summer of 1956?
a) A+
b) B-
c) D-
d) F
2. After the 1998 President Clinton’s Initiative on Race Town Hall Meeting at Ole Miss, Robert Khayat invited renowned African-American History Scholar John Hope Franklin back to the Chancellor’s home for a late-night snack. What did they eat?
a) Toast
b) BLTs
c) Cereal
d) Steak
3. What did Coach Johnny Vaught call Robert Khayat?
a) Bob
b) Robert
c) Bobby
d) Eddie
4. When Chancellor Robert Khayat told Governor Kirk Fordice that Ole Miss had orchestrated a $42 million sale of land to the federal government (land which the government had given Ole Miss), the governor replied —
a) “Where’s the check?”
b) “What’s my commission?”
c) “No wonder our damn government is broke.”
d) “Any more land left?”
5. What happened the week before the 2008 Presidential Debate at Ole Miss?
a) John McCain threatened to cancel
b) 3000 journalists descended on campus
c) A construction crew severed Mississippi’s one high-speed, fiber optic cable.
d) All of the above
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Submit your answers in the comments section below.
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Robert Khayat will be signing The Education of a Lifetime at Lemuria on Tuesday, September 24 at 3:00. A reading will follow at 5:30.
If you can’t make it to the event, you can call the store and reserve a copy for pick-up. You can also have the book shipped to you by calling the store (601.366.7619) or by placing your order online here.
Introduction to the Cereus Readers Book Club
We call ourselves the Cereus Readers in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” This book club meets in this same spirit of friendship and fellowship.
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A Night-Blooming Cereus Flower at Eudora Welty’s House on August 28, 2013.
The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her.
We meet at noon in the Dot.Com building adjacent to Banner Hall. Feel free to bring your lunch. All books are available at Lemuria, and be sure to ask for the “Cereus Reader” 10% discount when making your purchase for the book club. Please e-mail Lisa if you plan on attending or if you have any questions: lisa at lemuriabooks dot com.
This is a reading group open to all level of readers–anyone interested in learning about Jackson’s most important writer. Eudora Welty considered Lemuria her bookstore, and we want to honor her by discussing her books and authors she loved–meeting in the store where she shopped and signed her books.
After reading many works by Welty, we will read authors and works she herself enjoyed: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Chekhov, and mysteries. Finally, we thought we would read authors who have acknowledged Welty as an influence and inspiration such as Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, and Clyde Edgerton. It’s a bold undertaking, but we plan to be meeting for a while!
Cereus Readers is led by Carolyn Brown (author of A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty), Carla Wall, Freda Spell, Lee Anne Bryan, and Jan Taylor.
Fall Schedule
Thursday, September 26 at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building (adjacent to Banner Hall)
We will be listening to an audio recording of Miss Welty reading “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” courtesy of The Welty House and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
(You might be familiar with an audio of Eudora Welty reading that is still for sale. I never knew the history but I recently ran across a neat article on NPR about those Caedmon recordings here.)
Thursday, October 31 at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building
Hunter Cole, friend and scholar of Eudora Welty, is our guest speaker.
Saturday, November 16 at 2:00 in Lemuria’s Dot.Com Building
This unique event will open with a talk on collecting Eudora Welty’s work. Lemuria will display a special collection of Eudora Welty books—from trade to fine first editions.
As with all of the Cereus Reader events, everyone is welcome.
December
No meeting. We will resume meeting on Thursday, January 23 at Noon. Reading list to be announced.
Please follow this link to see what we’ve been reading since our beginning in January 2013.
Written by Carolyn Brown and Lisa Newman
These ladies, Rosa Lee Hill, Jessie Mae Hemphill, and Ada Mae Anderson, come from a long line of musicians. They were all taught to play by their father and or grandfather. When George Mitchell arrived in Mississippi he was introduced to Rosa Lee and her niece, Jessie Mae at Fred McDowell’s house. He couldn’t believe he was meeting Rosa Lee Hill and asked if he could record her. She tells him not tonight but then invites him to her house in a few days and maybe then.
Rosa Lee Hill was born in Panola County in 1911 and her father was Sid Hemphill. Sid was a popular 
musician in the Senatobia area. He played every night to make money for his family and taught all of them to play too. Rosa Lee began playing guitar at age seven and was playing parties with other family members by the age of ten. Jessie Mae was Rosa Lee’s sisters child and as soon as she was old enough was taught to play guitar by her grandfather, Sid. She soon though started to beat the snare drum with some of the Fife and Drum bands that played at the picnics around the area. Ada Mae Anderson was the daughter of Sid’s brother, George Hemphill, she played with the Hemphill clan when she was young but also sang in a female gospel band. Jessie Mae is probably the most well known of the 
“Hemphill Girls” having collaborated on many albums and touring Europe and being featured in the documentary Deep Blues. There is no doubt that the Hemphill Clan was an important and vital part of the history of the MS Hill Country Music history.
For your listening pleasure…Rosa Lee Hill singing Bullying Well. This was recorded in Como, MS in 1967.
While Othar Turner was born in Rankin County, MS in 1907 he lived the majority of his life in Gravel Springs near to Como and Senatobia. He grew up going to fife and drum gatherings and by watching other players he soon learned how to build and blow a cane fife of his own. He often was seen playing drums with Napoleon Strickland’s band and when he was too ill to play Turner started his own band. Turner upheld the tradition of the fife and drum until his death in 2003. Sharde Thomas, Othar Turners granddaughter, was 12 years old when he passed away. She took up the fife blowing in the Rising Star Fife and Drum Corps and continues to do so.
This is what Othar Turner says about how he learned to play music…
I started on a tin tub. Beat it with sticks. Take my hand and beat that drum and take me some sticks and went to doing just what the next fellow doing. Practiced and practiced till I got my right lick. Not just pecking on the drum, you got to play tunes on the drum. That’s right. So I learned ’em. I started playing on the tin tub when I was fifteen years old, and when I started playing the drum, I was seventeen.
And I learnt myself to blow the fice {fife}.
So I got me a cane and got me a nail. Just plain cane. Started to boring my holes; I couldn’t make none out of that. so I went and got me a thick piece of wire and put in the stove to burn the holes in there. My mama then come: “Get out of the way, boy! What you doing?” I said, “I”m trying to make me a fice.” “Oh, you ain’t going make you no fice. You don’t know how to make a fice.” I said, ” Mama, I’m going make me a fice. I’m going learn how to blow this cane.” I learnt.
Othar Turner’s Rising Star Fife & Drum band (Turner, fife; G.D. Young, bass drum; E.P. Burton, snare; Eddie Ware, snare) playing a picnic at Othar’s farm. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in Gravel Springs, Mississippi, August 1978.
While Fred McDowell was born in Tennessee, he lived most of his life in Como, Mississippi. He is considered one of the ‘elder statesmen’ of the Hill Country and during the 60’s was the most well known outside of the area. He began playing guitar at a young age for picnics and house parties and in 1959 Alan Lomax recorded him. While he did play an electric guitar, McDowell always insisted that “I do not play no rock n’ roll.” He passed away in 1972 just a few years after meeting George Mitchell.
When George Mitchell decided to make the trip to MS he called some friends for some leads to go about finding these “unknown” blues musicians. He was given Fred McDowell’s name and told that he lived somewhere around Como. He and his wife, Cathy, headed south hit I-55 and took Exit 52 and pulled into a Stuckeys to get some gas. George decides to ask the attendant if he knows McDowell and he says yes….
Do you know where I can find him? I ask.
You’re looking at him.
I’m taken aback. The first man we meet in Mississippi is Fred McDowell?! Damn! And he works in a service station?!
Mitchell tells McDowell what they are doing in MS, that they want to interview and record some unkown blues musicians from the area and Fred says that shouldn’t be a problem. He then invites them to his house where he promises to have some folks for them to meet. The rest as they say is history.
Mississippi Fred McDowell—Going Down to the River
As I’m sure most of you knew from my abundant earlier posts, we had a Waldo party yesterday in our Dot Com building and it went great! We had face painting, balloon animals, REAL animals (a huge thank you to Lucy from the Jackson Zoo for coming out!), cookies from Broad Street Bakery, ice cream from Sal and Mookie’s, lemonade from Fresh Ink and a beautiful cake from Campbell’s Bakery. There was also story time, door prizes, and the grand prize drawing for a box set of Where’s Waldo books. Y’all. It was so much fun!
I just want to say a big thank you to all of the businesses who participated in this year’s Find Waldo Local July event. You guys are what makes this city so special and unique–keep up the good work! We loved loved working with you all.
Participating Businesses:
Lemuria, Mississippi Children’s Museum, Polka Dot Pony, Pop Fizz, Fresh Ink, Eudora Welty House, Brent’s Drugs, Broad Street Bakery, Sneaky Beans, Nandy’s Candy, Jackson Zoo, Sal and Mookies, Museum of Art, Basil’s Belhaven, Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, Crazy Cat Bakers, Old Tyme Commissary, Buffalo Peak, Mississippi Craft Center, Campbell’s Bakery
Or be square.
Well here we are, right in the midst of the city-wide hunt for Waldo, and I’ve already got my eyes on the end of the month. I guess I can’t help it because when you and yours are done looking for the ever-sneaky Waldo, there is still so much more to look forward to! We’ve so enjoyed
getting into Jackson’s great community and partnering with several local businesses that before we wrap it all up we’d like to celebrate with everyone one more time.
On Saturday, July 27 at 11:00 we hope that all of you will join us at our Dot Com building for a carnival extravaganza with awesome games and activities, lots of cool prizes, a real live Waldo and the grand prize drawing for those who found Waldo in all 20 of his hiding places. We don’t care if you only found one Waldo, or even zero Waldos– you can still win some awesome advanced reading copies of great new books, get your face painted, and take pictures with Waldo. All of the amazing Waldo books by creator Martin Handford will be available for purchase and wow- what a selection to choose from! So mark it on your calendars people: the giant Waldo Hooplah is coming up!
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