December 4, 2006
Long day
driving up to Fredericton in the rain and back again in the snow, after two meetings and my final grad class (and a great class it was), and now the ever-popular Jinker Boy wants needs me to put him to bed, so I can't post at length. But two things: found an interesting blog, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie (what it says), at Thinkery. And, on C18-L, saw a link to an article from The Observer: "Diaries reveal passions at the court of King George" by Vanessa Thorpe:
Mary Hamilton is being called 'the female Pepys' for her illuminating record of royal life at the end of the 18th century. Now a battle is being fought to save it for the nation.
I already have a soft spot for her, as I have written on the ballad "Mary Hamilton." Though this Mary Hamilton had a better end, I'm sure.
August 11, 2006
BBTI
Old news to many I am sure but I just discovered The British Book Trade Index, a project of the U of Birmingham which "aims to include brief biographical and trade details of all those who worked in the English and Welsh book trades up to 1851."
August 6, 2006
Fantastic
Alien crop circles or "fantastic farmland art"? You decide (via Metafilter. And check out the links in the comments).
"The Biology of B-Movie Monsters" by Michael C. LaBarbera, via Plep.
Slash is universal! Check out Boys on Boys on Film (source mislaid; sorry!):
Boys on Boys on Film is dedicated to providing reviews and information for the yaoi fan community -- boys on boys, for women, by women. Anime, both yaoi and bishounen slashable anime, as well as gay-themed films are reviewed under Boys on Boys on Film. Yaoi manga which is being released in English is reviewed under Boys on Boys Between the Covers.
John at SF Signal collects a group of blog posts about genre. Some interesting reading. In particular, read Charlie Stross
Some bookish links at The Website at the End of the Universe. See in particular this post about book design.
And in closing, pages and pages of weird and wonderful photographs and magazine covers from mid-century, made all the more surreal by the babelfish translation from the original Italian (via The Website at the End of the Universe).
May 12, 2006
Street Literature Online
Following are some online sources of street literature (ballads/broadsides/chapbooks), pulled together from a discussion on C18-L begun by Fraser Easton (the first seven descriptions are his; subsequent links are from Jim Chevalier; the last three were culled from this blog):
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads: an online catalogue of holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major Oxford collections, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries; the database is a complete digitization of all the ballads.
The Word on the Street — Broadsides at the National Library of Scotland: online sample of nearly 1,800 Scottish broadsides, prose and verse, ranging from 1650 to 1910 and searchable by keyword, title, or subject, from the 250,000 or so held by the National Library of Scotland.
Lilly Library Chapbook Index: searchable index of 1,900 chapbooks — not themselves online — from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the United States, which were part of the Elisabeth W. Ball collection of children's books (Indiana University).
Early Modern Center English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800 — The Pepys Ballads: an online archive of the 1,857 ballads of the Samuel Pepys collection held by Cambridge University.
An American Time Capsule: from the Library of Congress Printed Ephemera Collection, which comprises 28,000 primary-source items from the 17th Century to the present; over 10,000 items are presently available online in the digitized Printed Ephemera Collection.
The Elizabeth Nesbitt Room Chapbook Collection: index with colour reproductions of the chapbook covers, but not the chapbooks themselves, of over 270 English and American chapbooks (and a few Scottish chapbooks) from the years 1650-1850, held at the University of Pittsburgh.
The Scottish Chapbook Project: still under construction; participating institutions are: Glasgow University, University of Guelph, University of Indiana, and University of South Carolina.
Streetprint: Revolution and Romanticism: a wide range of types, from street ballads through chapbooks and tracts to valentines, from Britain and mostly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Ballads and Broadsides Links on Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and America.
Sixteenth Century Ballads: "a collection of ballads from before 1600, containing sheet music and lyrics, both in their original form, and in a form intelligible to a modern listener."
The Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays: approximately 250,000 volumes of American and Canadian poetry, plays, and vocal music dating from 1609 to the present day.
From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing from the Michael Zinman Collection of early-American imprints.
Nineteenth-century British street ballads: a collaborative student project.
[cross-posted to Mrs. Spectator's Coffeehouse]
Paper coming together nicely.
Which doesn't give you anything to read, I know.
Maybe I will post it. Hmm, does that count as prior publication?
Here is the abstract (any thoughts welcome!):
Selling the City: sex, sin, and danger in popular print culture in the long-eighteenth century
Street print — cheap chapbooks and broadsides — is a largely urban phenomenon. As such, it mirrors and shapes the hopes and anxieties of the newly urbanized. This presentation explores three sets of texts. The first two are explicit warnings about dangerous sexuality, one addressed to men, the other to women. The former are usually comic: a hapless country fellow goes to the city only to be tricked by city women. The latter are didactic and tragic: in these narratives a young woman visits the city only to be ruined.
In the third set, the attraction of the city is the urban space itself. The city is magnetic in its exuberance, its abundance of life, its sights and its sounds. And while a significant subgenre of popular discourse ostensibly warns naïve provincials of sexual danger, another strain of that same discourse lures readers with intoxicating visions of the city. In the aggregate, these texts play a double game. Street culture is in itself alluring; the city is displayed as an object of fascination, even of fetishization. Concurrent with the exponential growth of London and other urban centres, the selling or mythologizing of the urban space became a prominent trend in popular print culture. For instance, there were many series of the "cries of London" (the distinctive patters of various street hawkers). The "cries" are presented as being of anthropological interest, and they are highly gendered. Virtually all such texts display images of male and female hawkers and their respective specialities.
A comparison of these two sets of representations — the rural victims, the canny street hawkers — presents one avenue to understanding the gendered interpolation of the recently urbanized into the new urban space.
The second paragraph is actually wrong in several ways — I can't be the only one who writes proposals and sends them off before I do much of the work, can I? — because the "Cries of London" phenomenon was largely middle-class, geared towards those interested in folklore and a rapidly vanishing culture. Or at least, it came to be. There were also many cheap chapbooks, aimed mainly at children. But surely the newly urban labouring classes would themselves have been interested in such texts?
More reading ahead. Waiting for Sean Shesgreen's Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London, which should be just the ticket.
February 22, 2006
The erotics of riding horses
GZombie posted a fascinating photograph of a piece of 18thc furniture: a chair from John Wesley's house that doubles, if one sits in it facing backwards, as a desk/reading stand. It looks wonderfully comfortable, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who covets it. GZ calls it "it an interesting artifact of both oral and literate traditions": "Sit forward, and you can talk with your guests. Sit backward, and you can read and/or write."
Go and look at the photo, then come back here.
. . . .
The first thing that strikes me about this chair is that while the sitting and chatting function is not closed to women, that is to say, ladies, the reading and writing function certainly is. Unless they sat side-saddle, which seems to be begging for a stitch in ones side. A woman sitting comfortably in this chair would be the very emblem of all that was frightening about women reading and writing, a masculinized, unsex'd female incarnate. Late 18thc misogynist, crazy person and literary critic John Polwhele invites his readers to
Survey with me, what ne'er our fathers saw,
A female band despising NATURE's law,
As "proud defiance" flashes from their arms,
And vengeance smothers all their softer charms.
I shudder at the new unpictur'd scene,
Where unsex'd woman vaunts the imperious mien;
Where girls, affecting to dismiss the heart,
Invoke the Proteus of petrific art (11-18)
There are lots of other great lines in the poem, but really, you should read it yourself. Suffice it to say that it is hysterical, in both senses of the word. In essence, it divides individual late-18thc women writers into two groups based on their supposed sexual status. If Polwhele had seen this chair, he would almost certainly have envisioned Mary Wollstonecraft — his particular bête noir — sitting on it in lascivious déshabillé doing heaven knows what with her quill.
My use of French, while it may be pretentious, is also appropriate, as Polwhele associated all manner of lewdness with France. And who knows, French women may have had chairs like this in every room of their homes. But no English lady would ever have sat down on it to read or write. And so what, then, is the "message" of this chair, to the casual viewer, to women in general, and to aspiring women writers, in particular? To riff on GZ's interest in orality, what does this chair say?
February 15, 2006
Street literature
Just read "Street Lit With Publishing Cred: From Prison to a Four-Book Deal" on the NYTimes site. For all my fascination with pre-20thc street literature, I have not thought much about any contemporary corollaries. There are some significant differences here: the writer profiled in the article is self-published, whereas in earlier periods there was a full and functioning apparatus, a parallel to the more genteel publishing industry. There is some interesting work to be done here tracing the shifts in street literature correlated to shifts in economic modes of production.
January 31, 2006
The Reading Experience Database
A fascinating project of which I have just become aware, The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945, is designed "to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945." Like so many other projects of wide scope — the OED; Francis Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads — the project is reliant upon the participation of volunteers to discover evidence of all sorts of reading. Once one has an instance to report, there are two forms, a short and a long, from which to choose.
December 10, 2005
Crimes online
The Complete Newgate Calendar (London, Navarre Society Ltd., 1926) and The Love Philtre: The Case of Mary Blandy, 1751-2, both among the e-texts at the Tarlton Law Library site (via Jim Chevalier at C18-L).
Who hath not heard of Blandy's fatal fame,
Deplored her fate, and sorrowed o'er her shame?
— Henley, a poem, 1827.
The Newgate Calendar is of course an invaluable resource, and reports of the Blandy case are fascinating in their constructions of gender:
Though not a beauty — for the smallpox, that stole the bloom from the cheeks of many a sparkling belle in hoop and brocade, had set its seal upon her face — the portrait of Mary Blandy shows that she was comely. Still, it is a picture in which there is a full contrast between the light and shadows. Those fine glistening black eyes of hers — like the beam of sunshine that illumines a sombre chamber — made one forget the absence of winsome charm in her features; yet their radiance appeared to come through dark unfathomable depths rather than as the reflection of an unclouded soul. With warmth all blood may glow, with softness every heart can beat, but some, like hers, must be compelled by reciprocal power. Such, in her empty home, was not possible. Even the love and devotion of her parents gave merely a portion of their own essence. From a greedy father she acquired the sacred lust, and learnt from infancy to dream, with morbid longing, of her future dower; while her mother encouraged a hunger for vain and giddy pleasure, teaching unwittingly that these must be bought at the expense of peace, or by the sacrifice of truth. To a girl of wit and intelligence in whose heart nature had not sown the seeds of kindness, these lessons came as a crop of tares upon a fruitful soil. But, as in the case of all women, there was one hope of salvation. Indeed, since the passion of her soul cried out with imperious command that she should fulfil the destiny of her sex, the love of husband and children would have found her a strong but pliable material that could be fashioned into more gentle form. Without such influence she was one of those to whom womanhood was insufferable — a mortal shape where lay encaged one of the fiercest demons of discontent. (1-2)
Well no wonder she poisoned her father.
November 20, 2005
And speaking of
The Little Professor, lust for paper, and electronic facsimiles, she recently linked to a Metafilter post on commonplace books. Some interesting links.
Lust for paper
Inspired by a post by Miriam Burnstein over at The Little Professor, and cross-posted to The Valve, about collecting 19thc books:
I don't think we talk enough about our love of paper. Paper, bindings: the physical experience of holding books and touching paper. And the addictive nature of book collecting is almost as visceral.
When I interviewed for my current job, I talked about work I was doing on print culture and street literature. I passed around a little pamphlet, an 18thc collection of songs. It sits inside a clear plastic envelop that screams noli me tangere, which is a dreadful shame as the paper is beautiful. Even 18thc street ephemera was printed on strong, thick paper, unlike the books The Little Professor describes. So on a whim I said, as it circulated, "Go ahead, slip your finger in. Touch it." At least one person looked revolted; perhaps my tone was more lascivious than was desirable, given the circumstances. At any rate, others must have shared my fetish, for here I am.
In my comment to Miriam B.'s post I mentioned Steetprint, developed at the University of Alberta and billed as
An online community dedicated to the public research, teaching, and sharing of formerly inaccessible texts and artifacts.... We also provide free software for creating your own digital collections. Our goal is to make formerly inaccessible and ephemeral texts and artifacts available to the widest possible audience, fulfilling the promise of the Internet and bringing information "back to the streets."
I have not looked too far into this myself — it's on my "To-do" list — but it seems most promising. And it might, somehow, tie into John Holbo's ideas for scholarly online community.
Is there a disconnect between lust for paper, and interest in on-line facsimiles? Not really, no: facsimiles are the only way most of us are going to see these texts. In fact, high resolution facsimiles (with workable interfaces) promote an appreciation for the materiality of texts in a way that plain-text transcriptions, as wonderful and useful as they are, cannot.
My only question is, given my admitted propensities, is looking at online facsimiles of texts the same as looking at porn?
[cross-posted to The Valve]
November 4, 2005
Reading habits
I have been thinking, off and on, about my students' reactions to publishing and writing conventions. In an odd way, the 18thc is further away from their experience than the 16th, since hardly any of them has escaped the prescription of one Shakespearean play, per year of high school (no more, no less).
[Side note: A student in my women's writing class, a mature student, told us that hers had been an "experimental year": they had been taught no Shakespeare in high school. At any point. She did not think there were any more serial killers in her year, proportionately, than in the population at large (I asked), though whether that makes the experiment a failure or a success, I'm not sure.]
At any rate, as a rule they react badly to even their limited exposure to 18thc printing and publishing conventions. I say limited because of course practically any text they come across is heavily mediated by editors and modern publishing practice. And the more junior the student, the more they complain (or the less self-conscious they are about complaining). We read Robinson Crusoe in my introduction to prose class and there was practically a rebellion because of the lack of chapters. Students who had borrowed cheesy moth-eaten editions from the public library, with chapters added (and sometimes even named!), were at risk of being mugged by the students who had shelled out for the decent edition I ordered through the bookstore. Though there is one student, bless her, who said she didn't mind the lack of chapters at all. I asked her how she decided where to stop reading, and she said, "I just read to the bottom of the page I'm on and shut the book."
Also with Robinson Crusoe: I had one student who was unable to read past "viz" until he found out what it meant. So here I am, in the strange (for an English instructor) position of telling them to read more skimmingly; to try to figure things out contextually but not to worry overmuch if something doesn't make sense, at least, as long as it doesn't seem too significant. But no, one "viz" and they stop dead.
A senior student is being driven mad by capital letters in unexpected places. I assure her she will get acclimatized, but here it is November and she is still irritated, so perhaps not. And don't get them started on long sentences.
Not sure where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm just venting about their venting.
I hope I don't sound critical or impatient, because I'm not feeling that way. I am, however, bemused. I use these opportunities to launch into discussions of changes in print technologies and conventions. And I tell them to thank their lucky stars for modern editions and then tell them about the long "s" &c. Sometimes, though, it feels as though 90% of what I teach is context.
Good thing New Criticism is long gone.
See "18th Century Ligatures and Fonts" by David Manthey.
And some further reading:
Robinson Crusoe and The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
An extremely abridged children's version. With pictures and the added bonus of a Greek translation.
According to the Guardian, "600 barrels of loot found on Crusoe island" (26/9/05).
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964): "Stranded on Mars with only a monkey as a companion, an astronaut must figure out how to find oxygen, water, and food on the lifeless planet." Defoe has a writing credit, and Adam West is in it. I'm sold.
Las Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe (1954). Directed by Luis Buñuel. Holy mother!
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (TV series, 1964). Listen to the theme music.
Robinson Crusoe, the game.
And did you know? February 1 is Robinson Crusoe Day.
April 24, 2005
Ye Olde Linkes
A Variety of Ladies' Head Dresses, The New lady's magazine (1786). Click for larger image.
Ladies' headdresses at the Beinecke (via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).
Sharon posts a multitude of links on crime. She writes, "Has to come around sooner or later in an election campaign." Indeed. She has also scored a copy of Hanging not punishment enough (1701) and plans to make it available. Please do!
The Gutenberg Bible held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is available on CD-ROM. G. Zombie has one. Here it is online. There are a number of other copies online: two at the British Library, which one can compare; the Göttingen Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1454); and the Keio Gutenberg Bible. Bible links from the University of Calgary. See also The Oliver Cromwell Website and The Goodspeed New Testament Manuscript Collection (both via Plep).
Libraries as fingerprints at Historiological Notes.
The fantastic architectural drawings of Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896-1981) at Giornale Nuovo.
The Opium Wars (via Plep).
Britain's 18th-c canal system being restored (via Metafilter).
Click for larger image.
April 3, 2005
Those were the days
The Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1836): Cover for 1828. Click for larger image.
Marking papers, still fighting a cold, hovering over at The Valve checking for comments on my comments, wondering how this ALSC issue is going to play out, particularly as I am an unregenerate race-class-gender kinda gal — but, the show must go on!
"Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books." Doesn't seem to be much online, but here are some links to photos in the media.(via BoingBoing).
Visit Giornale Nuovo for misteraitch's post about George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763):
a man of uncertain origins who came to claim that he was a native of the island of Formosa (i.e. Taiwan). So little was known about this island in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century, that Psalmanazar got away with an elaborately fanciful back-story, one which he eventually expanded into a marvellously inventive book-length Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, which was published in London in 1704.
Read the post and see the novel illustrations of "Formosans" and their putative language.
A Small Gallery of Magazine Covers: covers of nineteenth-century children's magazines (lots of great illustrations, including the one above); old magazine covers from Nostalgiaville; "Magazine Covers and Cover Lines: An Illustrated History" by Gerald Grow, Ph.D. (has some nice late 18thc and 19thc covers) (all via growabrain. Check the post for other magazine links).
The original handwritten MSS of Madame Bovary will be online next year (also via growabrain. Be sure to see his other book links).
The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film by Rebecca West. A lovely article about the century-old Italian tale and its successors (via Plep).
Ramelli's Machines: original drawings of 16thc machines (via Plep).
The rise of the English novel during the 18th century coincided with a growing pride in the landscape of Britain. As novels portrayed society, so maps and topographical views delineated the grandeur of Nature and the man–made elegance of new urban streets and squares. Town and country often provide the travelling backdrop to novels and poems, sometimes exerting such a strong a presence they almost become players in the plot.
From the British Library (via Plep).
Alexander Cruden and his concordance of the Bible (at Metafilter).
Moliere in English: translations by Timothy Mooney, online (via Plep).
Volcanoes, slugs and comets: rare scientific books at UCL (via C18-L, via Sharon).
Two posts by Sharon from some days back, Women’s history and gender history: what and why? and Alice Clark, working women’s historian. Loaded with her usual astute analysis, and links.
And, I don't usually post about ancient history, but this caught my eye: Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website (via Plep).
from Ramelli's Machines
March 26, 2005
And I just went on South Beach
Bibi posts to a wonderful site about medieval and Renaissance food. Check out Gode Cookery, a large site with lots of links with intriguing names like A Tale of Two Tarts and Gentyll manly Cokere (from the manly Pepys).
Other tasty links:
Cressee, an Anglo-Norman recipe
Medieval and Anglo Saxon Recipes and Medieval European Recipes
Medieval Italian stew
Medieval and Renaissance Food Homepage
Recipes from Cariadoc's Miscellany
Monumenta Culinaria et Diaetetica Historica: Corpus of culinary & dietetic texts of Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800
The Medieval & Renaissance Cookery Webring Homepage
The Forme of Cury, A Roll Of Ancient English Cookery, Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the Master-Cooks of King Richard II, Presented afterwards to Queen Elizabeth, by Edward Lord Stafford, and now in the Possession of Gustavus Brander, Esq. Illustrated with Notes, And a copious Index, or Glossary (facsimile)
The Renaissance at the Dinner Table
Sabina Welserin's cookbook (1553)
Food in Tudor England
Two fifteenth-century cookery-books
Jacobean Dinner Recipes
The Accomplisht Cook, or The Art & Mystery of Cookery (1685), and The Compleat Cook (1658): online facsimiles, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Receipts of Pastry and Cookery For the Use of his Scholars?, by Ed. Kidder, 17-- (facsimile)
Lady Logie's Recipes
18th Century Cooking Equipment
Tallyrand's Culinary Fare: History of Cooking
Seeds for an 18th Century Historically Themed Garden
Jed Wentz's Favorite 18th Century recipes (Quince trifle, anyone?)
"Was death by fire common in Colonial kitchens?" (No.)
Three period restaurants at the fascinating Fortress Louisbourg, N.S. (we visited a few years back)
18thC Cuisine: a blog
Regency Collection: Recipes
Victorian Cake Recipes from Godey's Lady's Book (1860)
Update (12:19pm): Don't know how I could have forgotten to check with the unparallelled linker of things early-modern: Sharon has a great page of foodie links.
March 17, 2005
Fun with words
Three ways to recycle those letters (and they do pile up):
Visit the Web of Letters (via Mirabilis),
spell words in letters made of book-covers (Warning! Resource-intensive. Via BoingBoing), or
spell with flickr photos (original source mislaid).
February 27, 2005
Streetprint
The Flowers of Maiden Lane, Pub. John Pitts, London, c1818 (Click on image for more information and a typscript of the text)
Jim Chevalier just posted the following to C18-L:
... this site has a variety of 'street literature' — including ballads, newspapers, etc. — much around our period.
It also uses a tool — the Streetprint engine — especially designed for this sort of thing that might interest anyone looking to put a collection of documents on-line.
Streetprint is open source:
A collection of British street literature needed an online home, a place where students and researchers could interact with these fragile texts as though they were sitting down with the original artifacts. The technological complexity of this task soon became a problem; specialists in centuries-old popular print are rarely internet wizards.
In search of an ideal solution, our team in the CRC Studio developed the Streetprint Engine, free software that gives researchers and collectors (like YOU!) easy-to-use tools to create powerful digital archives and share them on the web.
We broadened our focus along the way, creating a system which can now showcase much more than "street print." We like to think, however, that the ideals which underlie our first collection — finding value in the popular and the importance of public circulation, among others — remain at the core of the Streetprint Engine's mission.
What a wonderful idea. And a beautiful dovetailing of the web and print culture. Of all the texts that need to be digitalized, it seems to me that ephemera is close to the top of the list. It's certainly convenient to have canonical texts online, particularly for teaching, but the various projects, large and small, that digitalize street literature and other ephemera are invaluable. The Revolution and Romanticism collection at U of A contains a broadside about William Corder that I hadn't seen, quite possibly the only copy extant, and I probably would not have visited the collection and so might never have known of it.
February 13, 2005
Reading
Matthew Kirschenbaum continues his series of posts on the Technologies of Writing seminar he is attending. He discusses Don Quixote, and how revolutions in technologies of writing paradoxically spur innovation in older technologies. And, more beautiful graphics.
The playful antiquarian points towards a special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn with the evocative title "Handmade Literacies." She particularly recommends "Why I Like to Set Type by Hand" by master printer Barbara Henry:
Henry's essay reminded me of all the reasons why I love hand-press books — the poetic vocabulary of printing, the meditative nature of the process, and the connection to the history of printed word.
Full texts are available through Project Muse, if your library subscribes (ours does), but the abstracts can be read. There appear to be a lot of studies of children's literature in the mix.
January 30, 2005
Print links
Matthew Kirschenbaum posts about the first meeting of a Folger Institute Technologies of Writing seminar taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier,
and G Zombie is taking a bookmaking class. I envy them both.
Check out Secular Books, an exhibit of medieval manuscripts at the Getty (via Rashomon). And see their many other exhibits, most on not – so – secular books. Worth a look: Comic Art: The Paris Salon in Caricature, and The Making of a Medieval Book.
Misteraitch posts beautiful figurative alphabets.
January 26, 2005
Bits and pieces
"You know you're living in 2005 when you accidentally enter your password on the microwave." And nineteen more (via Old Schooler).
New York Times Link Generator gives you weblog-safe links, and there is a bookmarklet (via Bibi).
More webby-introspection: Disturbing Auctions. I wish I'd had the Tartan Doll for the Robbie Burns night party I went to on Saturday (also via Bibi).
Akbar and Jeff are real! (from BoingBoing).
Lip balm for the literati. Choose from ShakeSpearmint, Brontë Berry, Alcott Apricot, or PoeMegranate (from the Catalogue Blog). Come on, they're not even trying! Steinbeck Grape. Milton Pippin, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. You could base a whole line on Jeanette Winterson alone.
Drawings of aliens by children (via Life in the Present).
Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women: group blog which highlights cool (and some not-so-cool: Rhinoplasty glasses?) gadgets.
A collection of recent comments and posts on writing by hand, at Moleskinerie. Which led to a couple of interesting sites: Future of the Book and Visiting the Well.
Ballads & Broadsides and Last Words (also via Life in the Present). Madame de Pompadour's were apparently, "Wait a second." Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635) got a little cranky: "All right, then, I'll say it, Dante makes me sick." My favourite is Civil War General John Sedgwick (1813-1864): "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--."
January 24, 2005
Representations
From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing in the Michael Zinman Collection of early American imprints (via Bostonia). A lot of these items are reprints of, or are very like, texts printed in the U.K.
At the same site, another exhibit: Picturing Women explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative.
January 21, 2005
Fun with words
Hobbit paleontologists from the wonderfully named Improbable Research (via Krista).
This works on so many levels. All it needs are a few ex-wives (from G Zombie).
What's your Scrabble score? (via CatalogueAnnie).
January 14, 2005
It's payday
(Click for larger image)
and I just ordered this. For half price, my fellow dix-huitiémistes! I got very excited when I read that it was edited by William Smellie, but it was not the William Smellie I was thinking of.
Though they were both Scottish.
According to Robbie Burns,
SHREWD Willie Smellie to Crochallan came;
The old cock’d hat, the grey surtout the same;
His bristling beard just rising in its might,
’Twas four long nights and days to shaving night:
His uncomb’d grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch’d;
Yet tho’ his caustic wit was biting-rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.
Bonus links on the first Smellie:
William Smellie, A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (1754)
Of the Management of new-born Children, with the Diseases to which they are subject; A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1762)
Smellie lived for a time with William Hunter, author of Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata [The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures] (1774), and of whom I have written.
Collection of obstetrical and gynecological instruments in the Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.
Obstetric Literature and the Changing Character of Childbirth.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Collection.
And the second:
Major Topics of the Encycopedia Britannica, First Edition (1768–1771)
Buffon's Natural History: General and Particular translated by William Smellie (8 volumes, 1781).
A Romantic Natural History Bibliography
Elegy on the death of Smellie's son (facsimile from the wonderful The Word on the Street).
"Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science: Prospects for Study."
The Scottish Printing Archival Trust. See particularly Links to printing historical resources. Also of interest: First Scottish Books.
The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.
January 12, 2005
Something old
The Scrap Album: Victorian Greeting Cards, Valentines, and Scraps (via Plep).
Check for the History Carnival tomorrow.
There is a thread at C18-L about monstrous births.
Watercolours of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) (featured at Giornale Nuovo).
Misteraitch has started a new weblog at which he is reproducing the essays of Isaac D’Israeli from his Curiosities of Literature, a wide-ranging work full of excellent advice, such as the following:
AMONG the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling.
He also warns,
THE literary treasures of antiquity have suffered from the malice of men, as well as that of time. It is remarkable that conquerors, in the moment of victory, or in the unsparing devastation of their rage, have not been satisfied with destroying men, but have even carried their vengeance to books.
Though Misteraitch has rescued him from such a fate.
This is quite an inspiring project. I wonder if I have anything that is otherwise unavailable; one or two things, I think. Think how much we could add to the common pool if we all followed Misteraitch's lead.
December 9, 2004
Dream Anatomy
Dream Anatomy, an online exhibit by the U.S. National Library of Medicine about the history of anatomical imagery, from 1500 to the present:
The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.
Over the centuries anatomy has become a visual vocabulary of realism. We regard the anatomical body as our inner reality, a medium through which we imagine society, culture and the human condition.
Here is the gallery.
(Via Boing Boing).
December 5, 2004
Crime and punishment
More great links from Sharon, including one to a piece about murder ballads, a descriptive essay with several good links from a student of Michael Hancher's from what looks to be a great course on street literature. Of particular interest to me is the mention of two "murderous sweetheart" ballads, in one of which, "The Horrid Murder Committed by Mary Wilson," the murder was committed by a woman upon a man. Unfortunately that one is not reproduced, though the author does provide the reference. Very exciting to hear about; directly relates to a project I'm doing. But mum's the word.
November 16, 2004
Hogarth
The Jones Family Conversation Piece by Hogarth, held at the National Museum & Gallery Cardiff. Long-lost ancestors, no doubt.
The Rake posted, a few days back, on William Hogarth (1697-1764), and pointed towards the very useful page about Hogarth on Artcyclopedia, a comphrehensive site that links to online resources on particular artists: "Great art online, from over 8,000 famous painters, sculptors and photographers, at art museum sites & image archives worldwide."
Bonus links:
A previous post on print culture and Hogarth.
William Hogarth's Realm, Or, an XVIII Century Artist's Magazine: nice setup, like a period newspaper.
The Site for Research on William Hogarth
HOGARTH: "Helpful Online Gateway to Art History"
August 29, 2004
Print history
The Museum Plantin-Moretus website offers to guide the visitor "through 300 years of printing activity," though we are cautioned that
The atmosphere of a real printing business, where the smell of paper and ink blends with the sound of the platen,1 fiercely pushed on the press, cannot be conveyed in this virtual visit. To savour it, you should come and pay a real visit to this old Antwerp printing facility.
fn1. Platen are the thick slabs used to press ink into paper at high pressure.
(Link from Andrew Brown on C18-L).
August 27, 2004
Illustrations
Seeing Is Believing: 700 years of scientific and medical illustration: an exhibition from the New York Public Library (2000). Nice site which allows you to look at some of the illustrations in detail (from Mirabilis).
Drolleries and two posts about Andrea Mantegnaat Giornale Nuovo.
July 3, 2004
c18th resources
Three from Early Modern Resources from a couple of weeks ago: Dynamic Directory: 18th century, Glossary of 18th Century Costume Terminology, and 18th Century English Music.
Print culture links
MagazineArt.org: thousands of scanned magazine covers from the 19th and early 20th Centuries, including pulp and sf (via Boing Boing).
Victorian Pulp from Dennis Denisoff at Ryerson: penny dreadfuls and more! (via The Salt Box).
June 22, 2004
Caxon, Shakespeare, and Children's lit.
Priceless Caxton book goes on show for first time. Book written by Benedictine monk in 1360 and printed by William Caxton in 1482 (via Mirabilis).
William Caxton stamps commemorating the 500th anniversary of printing in 1976.
Printing in England from William Caxton to Christopher Barker — An Exhibition: University of Glasgow, November 1976 — April 1977.
Caxton's Chaucer: compare the 1476 and 1483 editions held in the British Library.
18th and 19th Century Shakespearean Illustrations (via Plep).
Shakespeare Illustrated "explores nineteenth-century paintings, criticism and productions of Shakespeare's plays and their influences on one another."
How Shakespeare Prepared Manuscripts.
Intermingling illustration and text: hyper-illuminated criticism of Shakespeare's Works.
Alice and Beyond: English Children's Books (via Plep).
The Children's Literature Web Guide.
Authors & Illustrators on the Web.
Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children's Literature.
June 11, 2004
Linked links
Three book links:
Altered Books: the site of the International Society of Altered Book Artists (via moleskinerie).
Pop-up and Movable Books, part of the University of Delaware Library's "world of the child" collection (via Plep).
Fancy limited edition of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver , list price $ 200.00. But as they say at the Literary Salon, while it's tempting, think of all the not-so-fancy books you could buy with that money!
Segue into SF links:
China Miéville's next novel, Iron Council, due out July 27, takes us, according to the editors, "back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later." (Thanks to The Agony Column). Miéville is also one of the authors represented in the anthology Cities: The Very Best of Fantasy Comes to Town, out this past April.
Segue into dead languages:
"Yoda speaks like Anglo-Saxon" (courtesy of Mirabilis).
Blogging in Latin (via Household Opera).
(Clever how I did that, wasn't it?)
June 3, 2004
Poaching
culture, poaching links...
Hand knit superhero costumes that look like grandpa's longjohns, embroidery samplers featuring comic book vignettes, beaded trading cards: it's all here (via Boing Boing).
The Heinz Nixdorf Museum: "From cuneiform to computers." Think stone tablets and computers that fill whole rooms (via Boing Boing. Who have the resources). On a related note, Liz Lawley contemplates adding to the landfill.
Elizabeth Gaskell's home open to tourists (from MoorishGirl). I've been to Chawton and Dylan Thomas's boathouse, have walked through Bloomsbury, and will be going to Haworth in July as part of a conference. Now to get up to Manchester ...
More on gendering robots, from the new, refurbished ms.musings.
Also from msmusings: WisCon, and seven women sf writers talk about rewriting a masculine tradition. This from Patricia Wrede: "Size does matter."
Perhaps I have misjudged Eliot all these years (from Rake's Progress).
The Shatnerian keeps up with his home town.
Vintage tobacco ads (and related products such as "Slug-a-Bug insect killer for use around children, food, pets!") and before and after trade card ephemera (from Beautiful Stuff [and here]).
"Corpi, Murakami, and Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction" by Cathy Stebly, about using hard-boiled fiction to examine the past (from wood s lot).
"Studies in Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy": twenty lectures that overview both genres, available as MP3 downloads from The University of Minnesota (from Beautiful Stuff).
Index to the biographies and writings of members of the Frankfurt School and The Charles Booth Online Archive (both from Plep).
June 2, 2004
Modern Translations
News story about e-commerce monks: "It's a modern adaptation of what we've done for hundreds of years." (from rebecca's pocket).
And, a review of Troy in mock-heroic blank verse, by Liz Penn:
I sing of arms and the man:
Very large arms, and the man who built them ...