I’m still reading Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper…
Jimmy sat up suddenly and dug out his faithful Brownie from his haversack. ‘How about a picture?’ he said, winding on the spool of film.
How about that. It was only two weeks ago that another book made me look up Brownie.
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
I got a Brownie as a child and it took great photos for 15 years including when I lived in Istanbul and on a later trip to Europe with my husband. It probably cost five dollars and was very sturdy.
ReplyDeleteUntil very recently (i.e. until you wrote about it here), I only knew a brownie as in a deliciously chocolately cake-kind of thing. Funny that it should come up twice in two completely different books in such a short space of time!
ReplyDeleteI knew about Brownies as a kind of fairies but not the camera. Perhaps they were just called box cameras here in Sweden. The English language did not have quite the same influence here a hundred years ago as it does now. It was not until during WWII that English became the first foreign language in Swedish schools (replacing German).
DeleteAnd yes I know the chocolate cake too... Those I like!!! :)
DeleteIf there's a Brownie camera in the scene, then this must have taken place in the 1950s or 1960s. Right?
ReplyDeleteMy Teaser is from THE LAW OF SIMILARS.
Actually, Sandy, that scene in the book is from 1938.
DeleteAnd the other book where I came across a Brownie was written in 1908!
I had misseed your esrlier post and was interested to see that the name was connected with the fairy like creatures. Did you know that junior Girl Guides in England are (or were) known as Brownies. Mischievous little creatures - sounds about right!
ReplyDeleteYes, I know a Brownie can also be a Girl Guide. I keep forgetting in which English-speaking country they're called what though. I was a girl scout myself once - here the junior ones are named after little blue butterflies though, so "blue wings" we were called. Maybe I was in it for two years or so - what I do know is that one outdoors camp was enough for me!
DeleteThere was a time when Kodak's Brownie was a household word. Well in the households I came into contact with anyway.
ReplyDeleteKodak cameras we had, I can't recall the name Brownie for it though so perhaps that name did not catch on here in Sweden.
DeleteYes, brownie cameras, and chocolate brownies and Girl Guide brownies, and oh yes, my boy Brownie says hello.
ReplyDeletemother had a brownie, i might have said that to you already. I finished Divine Intervention yesterday, a free book, and it stopped right in the middle, no ending, and Divine Justice starts up again where it left off, of course i bought the second book....
ReplyDeleteYes, I had a Brownie. And film on a spool that you had to thread. And when you took a picture, you were stuck with it, good or bad. No deleting and no editing.
ReplyDelete