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Product Description
Those who wish to understand a city's history visit museums, but Barbara Hodgson prefers a different approach. She explores the streets, bookstores, and markets, where a city reveals its most private self, displaying the contents of its attics and trash bins. Back alleys, obscure cemeteries, and hidden courtyards also offer up surprising finds and capture the essence of the city. Covering a wide cultural and physical geography from Brussels to Marrakech and Damascus to Portland, Trading in Memories follows Barbara Hodgson's travels through markets and other repositories of material culture around the world. The book looks deep into history through such objects as chandeliers left by French expatriates fleeing Shanghai in 1937 and glass lantern slides and stereoscope cards from around the world that attest to the human impulse for wanderlust, free or forced. This sumptuous book presents a wonderful visual and textual record of the true life and character of a place.
Amazon.com Review
There are books and then there are extraordinary portals to the imagination. Vancouver author, book designer, and globe-trotting packrat Barbara Hodgson crafts the latter. Whether writing fiction (The Tattooed Map, The Sensualist), non-fiction (The Rat: A Perverse Miscellany) or angular travel journals (Italy Out of Hand), Hodgson drops readers into palpable netherworlds with exquisite storytelling and accompanying images. Imagine that--books with pictures for grown-ups! It may be a simple formula, but it's Hodgson's and it works like a charm every time.
Trading in Memories, Hodgson's diary of her journeys through the flea markets of Europe, North Africa and North America and presented scrapbook-like with snapshots of her amazing finds, is a revelation that guides readers down back alleys and into musty shops. In each, we flank Hodgson as she gently fingers trinkets and seashells, sifts through distressed maps, stacks and unstacks slides and expired passports, all the while conversationally remarking on what this detritus represents--or could represent, given the right context and a bit of back story. Of course, the people we meet through Hodgson's travels (some living, some dead) add yet another remarkable layer to these richly detailed vignettes. Like Hodgson, we can only step back and marvel at those who have tiptoed through history, scattering biographical fragments here and there before retreating to destinations where sepia-toned photographs, house deeds and wooden boxes are unnecessary. Thanks to Hodgson, the departed can rest easy knowing their worldly goods, however meager or displaced, have at last found a warm and loving home. --Kim Hughes
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