Odd snow

Snowing on and off all day, not a lot of accumulation, but after dusk it changed from sleet pellets and little hair-like rods into a form I've seen only rarely. Rather than the usual hexagonal crystals with many-branched arms, we started getting little flakes of crystal, transparent and flat with irregular edges, like shards of very fine glass. They vary in size from a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch or more, The notable thing is that, like glass, they catch light and refract it. Lying in heaps on the ground they look like broken glass. Falling through the air in front of car headlights, they look like glitter, sparkling quite brilliantly. Unusually beautiful, and fragile. I'm sure they won't survive the night in most places. Of course the roads were still slippery and the wind has picked up and is making the earlier powdery snow drift across roads too.

Two new displays up in the library, both interesting I think. One is in honor of Edgar Allen Poe's 200th birthday (Jan. 19) and includes a pair of ghostly hands holding a copy of The Tell-Tale Heart as well as the mandatory white bust with a raven perched on top of it. Our most artistic staff member put it together with antiques interspersed with the books.

The other is our kick-off for the library's centennial year (founded in 1909) and consists of the ten best selling books in the US from that year. We went to used booksellers to get copies that are actually that old, and they look quite nice with the elaborate embossed covers and occasional color plate embedded in the binding. I'm actually looking forward to reading a couple of them, including The Silver Horde by Rex Beach, set in Alaska presumably during the gold rushes and featuring a fashionable woman and a dog team on the cover. Beach wasn't Jack London, exactly, but he was a commercial success and must be readable.