Around the Year
With C.S. Lewis and His Friends

(C. R. Gibson, 1986)

A book of days, illustrated throughout. This was a boxed gift book with padded covers. It was a Gold Medallion finalist.

Each page of this book begins with at least one event in the life of C. S. Lewis or someone connected to him, and each page ends with an appropriate quotation. The center of each page is lined for entries or reflections from the owner. The book makes a good birthday book, diary, or journal.

SIX SAMPLE DATES:
JANUARY 1
New Year's Day. J. R. R. Tolkien lectured on dragons to children at the University Museum in Oxford on New Year's Day in 1918.
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"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."
J. R. R.Tolkien, The Hobbit

JANUARY 2
Warren and C.S. Lewis saw Tintern Abbey on their first annual walking tour on this day in 1931.
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"While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years..."
William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," 1798

JANUARY 3
Birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892). Jill Flewett, 17-year-old war evacuee, left the Lewis home to return to London on this day in 1945. She studied drama, became an actress, and remained a lifelong friend of the Lewis brothers.
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"Living with Lewis was like having one's own private tutor...the whole of my time there he built up my confidence in myself and in my ability to think...I left the Kilns with deeper and more understanding, and with a belief that I was of value."
Jill Flewett Freud, in the Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal

JANUARY 4
Birthday of George MacDonald's first child, Lilia Scott (1852). George MacDonald liked the name of his first child so well that seven years after her birth he named a character in the first book, Within and Without, Lilia Scott
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"There was once a little princess who-- 'But, Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?' Because every little girl is a princess."
George MacDonald, Original beginning of The Princess and The Goblin

JANUARY 5
Warren and C. S. Lewis attended Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" on this day in 1939.
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"Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when the snowflakes were fallling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat a her window sewing...And after a while she gave birth to a daughter with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony; and she names her Snow White."
The Brothers Grimm, Fairy Tales, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

JANUARY 6
Epiphany or Twelfth Night. Warren and C. S. Lewis completed their last annual walking tour across open countryside on this day in 1939.
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"No, a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon."
C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Sheldon Vanauken.