The back shelf
Every volume since '98.
Copies of the older ones are thin on the ground — we only ever printed ninety or so — but the reading shelf at the grange has a full run, and the county library keeps a second set that doesn't leave the building.
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Volume XIV · 2024 fresh from the press
Cover color: river silt. 92 copies. Frontispiece: the walnut at the Pratt place, in winter.
A mild year, mostly. The big water didn't come. Two weddings, three babies, four departures named and one unnamed at the family's request. The orchard chapter ran long — it was a good apple year after three lean ones. New in this volume: a Marginalia & Corrections chapter where we owned up to three things we got wrong in Vol. XIII.
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Volume XIII · 2023
Cover color: wet slate. 89 copies. Howard Whitcomb memorial volume.
We lost Howard in February. Half the volume is, in one way or another, about him — his fiddle, his gardens, the time he drove a truckload of hay through the creek because the bridge was out and he thought he could make it and he did. The remembrance chapter ran sixteen pages. We printed an extra signature to fit it.
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Volume XII · 2022
Cover color: dried moss. 85 copies.
The drought year. The orchard chapter is thin and honest about it. A long letter from a reader who'd moved to the city thirty years ago and wanted to know if the old Baldwins were still bearing. (They were, a little.) First appearance of the "field-names glossary" — fifty-three names, some of which nobody under sixty had ever heard.
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Volume XI · 2021
Cover color: oatmeal. 81 copies.
The Tuesday-night flood is this volume's spine. We heard it from eleven households and printed five of those accounts side by side. Also: a page of weather notes penciled inside the back cover of a 1912 ledger, newly donated, newly read.
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Volume X · 2020
Cover color: clay. 78 copies. The quiet volume.
The year everyone stayed home. The doings chapter was short. The kitchen chapter was the longest it's ever been. We printed the tin-lunch-pail notice on the last page and got two letters about it — one said the initials might be for an uncle drowned in '39, the other said it couldn't be, for reasons. We're still sorting it out.
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Volume IX · 2019
Cover color: sage. 88 copies.
Aunt Rilla's crabapple recipe appeared here, with permission from the Halverson cousins, and people still talk about it. Also Ruth Elwood's last contribution — a half page about learning to drive the team at eleven, in her own hand, folded into a letter.
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Volume VIII · 2018
Cover color: barn red. 76 copies.
A fat volume. The county fair turned a hundred and we dedicated a chapter to it — prize lists from the old fair book, a half-dozen remembrances of the grandstand fire of '73, a photograph (line-drawn by Jody, since we don't reproduce photographs here) of the pie-judging table.
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Volume VII · 2017
Cover color: oat husk. 82 copies.
The marginalia volume — we ran a full chapter of scribbles, doodles, and penciled corner-notes found in the books we'd been lent. It proved more popular than anything else we'd printed and became a regular feature.
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Volumes I–VI · 1998–2016
Covers various. Print runs from 40 (Vol. I) up to the mid 70s.
The early volumes were smaller, stapled rather than sewn, and printed on a mimeograph borrowed from the grange. Vol. I was forty copies of thirty-two pages; Jody has digitized the keeper's copy and the library has a reader's copy that has been handled, by best count, by six hundred and eleven pairs of hands. We don't reprint them. They were of their year.
Reading copies
There is a full run on the shelf by the coat hooks at the grange hall. A reader's set also lives at the county branch library — ask at the reference desk, and they'll pull the box from the back. They ask you to read in the building, which is fair, and there are two quiet chairs by the window.