For the next few weeks, literary nourishment is on the menu alongside the scrumptious scones, croissants and tarts at The Artist Baker in Morristown.
True Love Books, a popup bookshop, features 70 favorite works of author Carey Wallace (The Blind Contessa’s New Machine, Stories of the Saints, The Ghost In The Glass House).
The books will be displayed in the Cattano Avenue bakery through May 14, 2022. They’re all hand-altered, with Wallace’s short essays on vellum explaining why she loves these stories. (Scroll down for a sample.) Visitors can post their faves and testimonials, too.
And Wallace will be on hand for the next three Saturdays, from 10 am to 3 pm.
“I love asking people what their favorite books are,” says Wallace, a Michigan native who know calls Brooklyn home. “So many of us don’t feel like we’ve read enough or maybe we don’t think we’re reading the right things. But when you ask people what book they really love, they just light up – and you learn so much!”
For her, True Love Books answers the question her fans always ask: What is your favorite book?
Aspiring writers also can learn tricks of the trade from Wallace. She’ll teach Poetry As Play on May 7, and Fundamentals of Storytelling on May 14.
Both classes run from 4-6 pm, and the $65 price includes bakery treats. All ages are welcome; slots can be reserved here.
“Small businesses are personal and there is freedom in having one. I like to explore that,” says Andrea Lekberg, the painter-turned-chef who opened The Artist Baker in 2009.
Those explorations include some interesting collaborations. Over the years, Lekberg has shared her dining room with a bike mechanic, a florist and a gourmet pasta vendor.
“I like this because it is more conceptual than the businesses we have had in the shop,” says Lekberg, who sees prose and pastry as complementary dishes. “I like both!” she says.
She also savors the company of creatives.
Lekberg met Wallace through one of them, mutual friend Danielle Merzatta of the Merzatta jewelry store, a couple doors down. (Merzatta and her husband Chris have turned pine cones and corals into prized pieces of wearable art.)
Wallace started popping into The Artist Baker…and a popup bookshop was cooked up.
A novel confection, you might say.
SAMPLE ESSAY: CAREY WALLACE ON LEWIS CARROLL’S ‘ALICE IN WONDERLAND’:
Alice in Wonderland was published at the end of the American Civil War, but still resonated a century later, after the invention of electric light and the atom bomb, when Disney made it one of the world’s most popular movies. How does a children’s story survive that much history? Maybe because it’s so different. It refuses to teach any kind of lesson, other than one that’s true in all times and places: the world is full of nonsense, some of it delightful and some of it terrifying. And despite the elaborate ways all of us pretend, none of us really know what we’re doing – especially the people in charge. Alice isn’t on a mission to save the world or even find her own way home: she’s an accidental explorer in a world that makes as little sense as our own. Almost all fiction, no matter how grim or romantic, reimagines a world that’s far more orderly than ours, where things happen for reasons that we can see and understand. Alice has to negotiate with a world as absurd and dazzling as this one, where it’s not always clear if she wants to stay or go home. She doesn’t figure out a secret or do the right thing – unless that’s putting up resistance to the nonsense around her, which she does at the end of both books, prompting the end of her dreams. But she always does get home in the end, and there’s a deep grace in that, too. The story doesn’t force her to make sense of the world, or earn her homecoming. But it brings her home safe, anyway. If you’ve read Alice before, it’s both stranger and smarter than you remember. And if you haven’t, you’re in for one of the world’s rare treats.
