'Turnpikes to free thought'

Cobblestoned Acorn Street, on Beacon Hill

“Boston is full of crooked little streets but I tell you that Boston has opened and kept open more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men.’’

— Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), physician, poet and essayist and father of famed Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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A Little, Brown and Co. insignia used in 1906. Little Brown was founded in Boston and stayed there until the late 20th Century. It has published many famous New England and other authors since its founding, and it helped make Boston for many years the leading book-publishing city in America and Boston a literary mecca.

"The assertion that Boston was the literary center during the period in which American literature acquired a shelf of its own in the library of the race is hardly open to dispute."

— M.A. DeWolfe Howe (1864-1960), author and editor

Wise watercolor

“The Sentinel’’ (watercolor), by Jeanette Fournier. It’s part of her show scheduled for The Gallery at WREN, in Bethlehem, N.H., Sept 4-29. We’ll see if the pandemic lets it happen.

Ms. Fournier is a watercolor painter and graphite artist whose work is driven by a love of nature and the creatures that live in it.

She says: "The compositions of my work are meant to be intimate, close-up portraits of the animals, birds and other creatures with which we share this world," especially those she sees around her Littleton, N.H., studio and in the nearby White Mountains.

Her Web site:

www.jfournierart.com

In Bethlehem, looking toward the snow-capped White Mountains.

— Photo by Stevage

The Littleton Public Library, with statue of Pollyanna

— Photo by Doug Kerr