Leather Hat Boxes

When I was visiting in Baraboo at Circus World earlier this month, of course I had to make sure I hung out in the gift shop. There are some cool things in those gift shops, and the one thing I fell in love with was a leather hat box. It is made in an old style, with buckles and burnished slide-locks and studs, and with a handle on top for carrying. It was about 10" across and 10" tall. I wanted one, but at the $60 price I had to pass. It would have made a really great face painting kit, very unique for some of my gigs.

Hubby must have remembered, because he brought me one home when he came back this week!! I'm so excited!! I can hardly touch it, I'm afraid I'll ruin it. LOL

As a bonus, snuck inside the box was a neat little paperback book, Circus Lingo by Joe McKennon. Published in 1980 by Carnival Publishers of Sarasota, Florida, it is an interesting collection of circus lingo/words and their explanations. Some of these I've heard of, others are completely new to me. There are two interesting things about this book. One is the collection of pictures he included, some captioned, some of them not. The second is that it appears that no one proofread the copy before going to press. There is an interesting mix of mispelled words that mostly look like typos. I found that odd as well as amusing. It's almost like it's self-published. Perhaps it is. I need to see if this guy wrote anything else. He brags in most of this book about how many years he spent travelling with different shows. It would be interesting to see if he has other books out there.

But it's a cool little book anyway, even with its oddities, and I'm going to try to work some of the terms from the book into my novel. I'm finding more and more details to add about my characters, how the story is going to progress, etc.

I'm still at a loss as to how this book will fit in. I don't know if it will be litfic, or chicklit. It started out as a romance, but there's no way this will be a romance now. And at the rate I'm putting together information, it may just end up being quite epic in scope. And I'm not sure I want that, either.