Happy National Button Week -- and a wonderful giveaway from Nina Edwards!

 ~*~*~This post will stay on top of the blog through March 18; please scroll down for other, newer posts, too!~*~*~

Nina Edwards, author of On the Button, is here to help us celebrate National Button Week, March 11-18, with a contest for all of us, on her own blog!  Read on:

Hello there, Button Floozies! I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when I found your site. I was in the middle of writing a cultural history of the button, and battling with the ins and outs of industrial production at the time. (How was a threefold made? What was meant by églomisé?) 

Here were like-minded people who delighted in the beauty of even the most ordinary buttons. Who noticed how they could recall the past. Buttons rich in romance, sexy as hell, tenderly sad or sometimes just mad, bad and evidence of brutality.

The first time I really noticed buttons was astride my grandfather’s knee. He was the carthorse - clip-clop, clip-clop - and I was the laughing farmer. My grandfather would pretend to stumble in a ditch, be bitten by a passing wasp, be startled by a lorry, and lurch about extravagantly, so that I would have to grab hold of my misbehaving steed. All I could reach were the buttons on his tweed jacket - large brown buttons they were, just right for a small fist. Like the magic buttons on the ebony horse of the Arabian Nights, I rode on, fearlessly.  These plain buttons are in my button tin today.

What stories occur to you? Why do you love buttons? How do buttons work their magic? There are 3 copies of On the Button for the most evocative and unusual or just plain funny stories, which – if you email them to me/my publisher at tabbs@ibtauris.com – will all be posted on my blog: buttonsandoffal.

(‘Offal’? … but that’s another story)