If you have seen the Friday Video on the Two Nerdy History Girls blog today, you will find this great short on the background to the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster that is now seen and heard everywhere. I didn’t realize that the poster was discovered in a box at this fabulous bookstore, Barter Books in Alnwick Station, Northumberland, and the rest as they say is history.
But in searching around the bookstore’s website (one of my addictions sorry to say), I discover a lurking Jane Austen in the “Writer’s Mural” in the shop: visit the website yourself to explore the painting and enlarge the various images and find out why each author has been included, but here is the full painting, by Peter Dodd, the panel with Jane Austen, and a closeup of her image…
Famous Writers Gallery, by Peter Dodd
Jane Austen and Friends
Jane Austen closeup
Are any of your other favorite writers lurking about here? – if you were to compile such a wall mural, which authors would you put in it?
All Images courtesy of Barter Books – visit them soon!
Jane Austen in Vermont 
I had seen the video this morning but never went any further. Thanks for the head’s up!
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I was not even aware of the other blog. But, when I was in England doing the Jane Austen pilgrimage that I had dreamt of for years, our Brit friends wanted to take us to their caravan (mobile house permanently set up in a park just for them) before we went to do the Jane things. The wife told the husband that he must take us to Barter Books because she knew I loved books and it was her favorite haunt there. Funnest used bookstore I’d ever been in. And as I was checking out with anything Jane I could find, I saw at the counter that they had the Keep Calm mugs, Aprons, and T-shirts, I believe. I asked about them and was told the story behind them. Somebody donated a box of books and when they looked through it they found 3 posters that had been created for the citizens during the war, WWII. I found that charming. Now, I’ve got to go to this site to see what they put together. Thanks for posting about this.
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Lovely story Karen! – how wonderful for you to have been there, when it seems to be out in the middle of nowhere… and from there to Jane sites, it doesn’t get much better, does it?
Deb
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I looked at the mural to see if I could find E.F. Benson, but the only one who looks remotely like him is the chap in puttees talking to the gent in green, and frankly, he looks more like Adolf Hitler than E.F. Benson. Or, if anything, only the son of a writer, Rudyard Kipling’s son, Jack. Anyway, E.F. Benson would be one of my nominees. If we can go beyond England, how about Bill Bryson? Not deathless prose, I know, but laugh-out-loud funny. I assume that’s Mark Twain in white in the mural. If not, him and David McCullough for my own mural. Edgar Allan Poe’s a must, and right now I’m loving Garrison Keillor all over again because I picked up Lake Wobegon Days again last night and it kept me up waaaay past my bedtime.
Thanks for pointing to the video. Fascinating!
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Hi Bonnie – no Benson I’m afraid – the guy is thankfully not Hitler but Wilfred Owen and that fellow in green is John Keats [you can scroll over the mural and enlarge each portrait to see who it is] – and yes, that is Twain… here is the list of authors:
Charlotte Brontë, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie , Angela Carter, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Mark Twain, T S Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, John Keats, Wilfred Owen, Alan Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare , Doris Lessing, Charles Dickens, Edward Lear
but there is also the list of names on the railing: you can read about the choices for the mural and the railing here:
http://barterbooks.co.uk/html/muralText.php
Thanks Bonnie for stopping by – I like your list too!
Deb
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