Author and Illustrator, Drs. Mulberry Egstorf-Pantophlet, is on St. Maarten to present her 320-page illustrated book For a Stick o’ Fire with over 1500 verses and rhymes.
The public of St. Maarten is invited to attend the book launch at the Philipsburg Jubilee Library, on Monday, June 2, at 7:00 PM. Egstorf-Pantophlet will be doing a reading and book-signing session at the launching ceremony. Copies of her books will be available for a special price.
According to Egstorf-Pantophlet, “The title For a Stick o’ Fire stems from the old St. Maarten saying that folks used when they came for a very brief visit. It relates to a time when a person who wanted to light the fireplace or coalpot, would go to a neighbor and ask for a stick of fire and hurry back home with it before it extinguished.” The illustrated verses and rhymes of For a Stick o’ Fire are all true accounts and give readers a perspective of how life used to be in the 1950s and 1960s, in remote and small sections of the Dutch cul-de-sac valley, now known as Marigot Hill, St. Peter’s and South Reward.“At that time this area was referred to as ‘out in the country’ and formed a world and environment all by itself. Most people could find typical old technologies, skills and activities such as; windmill-power, herding and caring for cattle, vernacular building-style, jollification, baking with fire-untop-fire-underneath-method, ironing with the goose, boiling the sheets in a bath-pan outside, fabricating spatalashes, building coal-keels and a host of ingenious items such as the goblet, the cotta, the coppa and more,” said Egstorf-Pantophlet.
The author’s collection of short stories resulted from her need to share and preserve St. Maarten’s cultural and historical stories, which Egstorf-Pantophlet believes, “in the face of progress and modernization, have disappeared or changed beyond recognition.”The publication of the book has been realized with the support of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Caribsche Gebied.
After the book launch, on June 2, books will be available at the Library and for purchase at the St. Maarten National Heritage Foundation and Museum on Front street. Photo Caption: (L-R): Library Director, Monique Alberts accepts a copy of Drs. Mulberry Egstorf-Pantophlet’s book, For a Stick o’ Fire. (PJL photo)
