Portrait of a dog, seated on a red cushion with gold embroidery, garden and sky in background. Painting.
‘How grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. As though I were just as wonderful
as the perfect moon.’ ~ The Sweetness of Dogs, Mary Oliver. #BookWormSat
🖼️ Henri van Assche, 1801.
But the Badger’s fort was dug when the whole land was one oak.
His face is his ancient coat of arms, and he wears the same grey cloak.
Ted Hughes
CF Tunnicliffe #BookWormSat
"Lyra's heart was thumping hard, because something in the bear's presence made her feel close to coldness, danger, brutal power, but a power controlled by intelligence."
—The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman
#BookWormSat
"My armor is made of sky iron, made for me. A bear's armor is his soul, just as your dæmon is your soul."
—The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman
#BookWormSat
"That's why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten."
—The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman
#BookWormSat
#BookWormSat
" ... when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' - Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.”
Barry Hines - A Kestrel For A Knave
🎨Taymouth Hours MS 13
Bears playing in forest, painting.
‘The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.’ ~ Frost
@racheldeering.bsky.social here for the rest of a very wild #BookWormSat 🦁 🦌 🐻 🐻❄️ 🐕 🐎
🖼️ Ivan Shishkin
Painting of a puppy and a frog in the grass.
This is @signemaene.com logging off. #BookWormSat services are temporarily halted as we are off to rebuke this little rascal for teasing a frog.
The brilliant @racheldeering.bsky.social will be with you soon! 🦁🐻❄🐶 Art by Edwin Landseer.
"He's very imprudent, a dog is. He never makes it his business to inquire whether you are right or in the wrong, never asks if you are rich or poor, silly or wise, sinner or saint. You are his pal. That is enough for him, and he is going to stick to you."
- Jerome K Jerome
#BookWormSat #dogs
Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!
Bram Stoker, Dracula
#BookWormSat
First edition cover American Fairy Tales Author L. Frank Baum Illustrator Norman P. Hall Harry Kennedy Ike Morgan Ralph Fletcher Seymour
This idea pleased the gulls. One after another they plucked with their beaks the softest feathers from under their wings, and, flying down, dropped then gently upon the body of the King of the Polar Bears.
~ The King of the Polar Bears, L. Frank Baum
#BookWormSat
Very large dog, teeny tiny people
In which some very tiny footprints - and a very large dog - and a girl who just up and disappeared - almost drove everybody in town, including Doc Savage, crazy!
Unruly dogs for #bookwormsat , how about just one (very) large one?
Doc Savage, The Wee Ones by Kenneth Robeson. Aug 1945, cover artist not attributed. #booksky
"I have never met anyone worth knowing who had fewer than four feet."
- Dorothy Parker
(But I admit from memory)
#BookWormSat #caturday #dogs #DorothyParker
“I bless the time
When my good falcon made her flight across
Thy father’s ground.”
Shakespeare, THE WINTERS TALE, 4.4
#BookWormSat
#ElizabethanMeetCute
"There she is," she whispers, urgent and low. "Can you see her?"
"Who?" he says, distracted by the waist, the rosemary, the shelves around him, which are becoming clearer in the gloom, as his eyes adjust to the dark. "What?"
"My falcon," she says.
O’Farrell, HAMNET #BookWormSat
#ElizabethanMeetCute
Part of the Jim Steranko painting used as the cover art for Warlocks and Warriors. A purple-black sky with red clouds over red sand dunes. A human warrior on horseback armed with a sickle-like weapon is battling a lizard warrior armed with a sword and flail. This horse is not the one from the Zelazny story. So I guess it's a bonus horse!
#BookWormSat
The anthology Warlocks and Warriors (1970) included The Bells of Shoredan (1966) by Roger Zelazny, one in a series of his stories featuring a half-elf named Dilvish the Damned and a talking, metal-skinned demon horse.
Art credit in alt text.
“A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.”
(Arthur Conan Doyle “The Hound of the Baskervilles”)
🎨 Sidney Paget (1901)
#bookwormsat #booksky #bookillustration
"The fabled musk deer searches the world over for the source of the scent which comes from itself."
- Ramakrishna
#BookWormSat #deer #Ramakrishna #Hindu #Mysticism #philosophy
Beorn listens to Gandalf tell a tale in his hall.
‘A very good tale! The best I have heard for a long while. If all beggars could tell such a good one, they might find me kinder.’
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit,’ Beorn is a Skin-changer who can transform into a huge black bear. #BookWormSat
🎨 Ted Nasmith
Photo of bird with white head but black crown with orange beak grey tip and black body
“I daydream about keeping a striated caracara in my apartment…watching it build a nest of shredded t-shirts, LP jackets, and guitar strings in my bookshelf…tearing into a box of cereal with its beak.”
Jonathan Meiburg-A Most Remarkable Creature
#BookWormSat
🖼️ crested caracara-genius Falconidae
“It is not hard to be outpaced even by a sickly polar bear, nor are appointments with death in the arctic ever truly unexpected”
—Helen McClory’s “The Companion” (MAYHEM & DEATH, @404ink.bsky.social 2018) is a haunting parable of environmental calamity
#BookWormSat 💙📚
www.404ink.com/store/p/mayh...
Illustration of a red and black Saint Bernard dog with glowing white eyes and a collar with a cask with skull on it
Loyal companion Sweet Boy from the Saga comic - modeled after a Saint Bernard, he is capable of firing tranquilizer darts from his nose.
#BookWormSat
🖼️ Fiona Staples
In James Hogg’s 1837 novella “The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon” (included in POLAR HORRORS, @britishlibrary.bsky.social 2022) the hero orphans, then adopts a polar bear cub. But Hogg’s story is “a dark satire of nature pushing back”…
#BookWormSat #C19 #romanticism
shop.bl.uk/products/pol...
Griffin, the legendary creature with the body, back legs and tail of a lion, and the head and wings of an eagle. Lion was traditionally the 'king of the beasts' and Eagle the 'king of the birds', so Griffin became a powerful and majestic creature. #bookwormsat #mythology art: Stephen G. Rae
Griffin was a legendary creature with the body, back legs and tail of a lion; the head and wings of an eagle.
Lion was traditionally the 'king of the beasts' and Eagle the 'king of the birds', so Griffin became a powerful and majestic creature.
#bookwormsat #mythology
art: Stephen G. Rae
Iain Crichton Smith DEER ON THE HIGH HILLS (1962) I. A deer looks through you to the other side, and what it is and sees is an inhuman pride. II. Yesterday three deer stood at the roadside. It was icy January and there they were like debutantes on a smooth ballroom floor. They stared at us out of that French arrogant atmosphere, like Louis the Sixteenth sustained in twilight on a marble plinth. They wore the inhuman look of aristocrats before a revolution comes, and the people blaspheme the holy bells in the high steeple. Before the ice breaks, and heroes in spring come up like trees with bursting wrongs in their arms and feed the nobles to the uniform worms. So were these deer, balanced on delicate logic, till suddenly they broke from us and went outraged and sniffing into the dark wind. Difficult to say where they go to in the harsh weather when the mountains stand like judging elders, tall on either hand. Except that they know the ice is breaking now. They take to the hills pursued by darkness and lie beneath the starry metaphysical sky. Sometimes in a savage winter they’ll come down and beg like fallen nobles for their bread. They’d rather live in poverty than be dead. Nevertheless there’s something dangerous in a deer’s head. He might suddenly open your belly with his bitter antlers to the barren sky. Especially in winter when tormented by loneliness they descend to this road with great bounding leaps like the mind of God.
A deer looks through you to the other side,
and what it is and sees is an inhuman pride…
—from “Deer on the High Hills” (extract) by Iain Crichton Smith
published in NEW COLLECTED POEMS, @carcanet.bsky.social 2011
#BookWormSat #poem #poetry
www.carcanet.co.uk/978185754960...
#BookWormSat
At the top of Carn Gafallt, in the uplands of the Radnor forest, lies a pile of rocks, and on top of these a single stone with the form of a dog's paw embedded in it.
This is the footprint of Cafall, the favoured hound of none other than King Arthur himself!
[Photo by Peter Standing].
Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes from a TV adaptation of "The Hound of the Baskervilles."
"Footprints?"
"Footprints."
"A man’s or a woman's?"
Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered.
"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
#BookWormSat #BookChatWeekly
#BookWormSat
"They set out by sea towards Wales; Arthur and his hosts, his horses and his dogs went aboard Prydwen, and in the twinkling of an eye they saw them. Twrch Trwyth came to land at Porth Cleis ..."
Mabinogion - [the Boar Twrch Trwyth with treasure of shears and a comb]
🎨Margaret Jones
#BookWormSat
"... Cyledyr on another horse plunged into the Severn with him and took from him the shears. But ere ever the comb could be taken he found land with his feet; and from that moment neither dog nor man nor horse could keep up with him ..."
Mabinogion
🎨Margaret Isaac
Alt Text: Princess Mary of Cambridge with Nelson, a Newfoundland dog, by Edwin Landseer, 1839. A small blonde girl is standing next to a huge black and white dog. The dog has a biscuit on top of its nose. The girl is holding the other half of the broken biscuit. NOTE: The girl/princess is painted as if she were a miniature adult woman. Her dress has slipped down, exposing her shoulder, almost "coquettishly". I've read that this was a favorite painting of the family, including the future daughter of the pictured princess. It may have been a convention of the times; we see it with boy children as well. But the implied sexuality is, to me, disturbing in any age, perhaps especially in our current Epstein-Trump-Mountbatten era.
#BookWormSat
As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her.
📘Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
🖼️Edwin Landseer (see alt txt)
