[Taylor514ce]

I've just begun to read "The Secret of Lost Things", by Sheridan Hay. I'm only in chapter 2, but can already tell I'll love this book. Any book that contains a paragraph like this, is obviously a lovingly written and very evocative story. The narrator is recalling trips with her mother, a hat-maker, to a supplier with a large cabinet of drawers full of hat-making knick-knacks:

I used to imagine that the endlessly varied objects contained in the drawers appeared only moments before the knob was pulled and the drawer opened, as if conjured by my wish to see them. The wall of drawers appeared to my small self to hold everything; and "things", of course, were the sum of the world.

Yes! I had a similar feeling about card catalogs in libraries. I could pull open the drawer, and that action itself manufactured the cards, the details, the map to the books.