The nesting dolls are coming –  ring the bells! Matryoshka dolls, those wonderful and brightly painted roly-poly Russian works of art, are arriving in Andover on Friday evening, March 22, at 7 PM in the AE/MS gym.

Marina Forbes, under the auspices of the New Hampshire Council for the Humanities, will present an informative program detailing the history and cultural background of the wooden dolls. She is bringing some to share, and if you’ve ever had the delightful experience of playing with them, you know we’re all in for a treat. See you there.

The Art Forger

Hang on to your original works of art. The most highly-touted book of the new year, the book that few libraries can keep on the shelves, is The Art Forger by BA Shapiro.

Struggling artist Claire Roth keeps herself afloat making passable reproductions of famous art for those who can’t afford the real thing. It’s a living, true? But when she’s commissioned to make a copy of a Degas painting stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston, and the real painting turns up at her studio, things get a little dicey.

Ms. Shapiro has taken over 20 years to hatch her novel, which is based on the actual theft of 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Not one of the paintings has ever been recovered, a fact that might inspire many an author.

Check out The Art Forger, currently in circulation at the Bachelder Library … if you can get your hands on it.