What I did on my autumn vacation…

On our first day of our trip to the Berkshires, my wife and I ventured into Lee for dinner. We found an antiques store where I chanced upon this little item. At $85, it was one of the more pricey things in the shop, where it remained as of our leaving.

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Later in the week we visited to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.

Rockwell was one of my father’s favorite artists and so became one of mine, too. He was known, very simplistically, as the George Bailey of illustrators (at least in my mind), depicting life in small town America. He painted more than a few baseball-themed items including these familiar images which appeared on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post:

Last year, the original version of “The Rookie” sold at auction for more than $22 million. Ron Schick’s 2009 publication Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera features photos taken for the artists from which he drew his pictures. If memory serves, the behind-the-scenes explanations of both the Rookie and Cubs renditions appear in the book.

These were just some of Rockwell’s baseball work. New to me from the museum’s SEP display was this one:

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We had lunch at the famous Red Lion Inn after which we visited the gift shop where I discovered these:

Those who read this blog regularly know I pride myself in knowing what’s coming down the pike but I totally missed these. The Gehrig book, published this year, weighs in at nearly 600 pages and Bay State (2014) is no slouch either at almost 375. Kevin  Larkin is a resident of the region and I’ll be having him as a guest on the Bookshelf Conversations podcast in the near future.

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During down time, I was reading Doug Wilson’s new title, Pudge: The Biography of Carlton Fisk. What could be more appropriate? My review of the book appears on Bookreporter.com.