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Nature Domesticated: A Victorian Seaweed Scrapbook
As children many of us will have collected flowers to press between the pages of books and, if we were very organised, gathered them into scrapbooks. But how many have done the same with seaweed?...
A Voyage Round the World
In August of 1706, William Funnell, the First Mate on the ship St. George, landed in England after a three-year voyage around the world. Organised by Captain William Dampier, the goal of this...
Archibald Sharp: The Greatest of the Victorian Bicycle Engineers
With cycling undergoing a renaissance in Britain, it seems an appropriate moment to look back to the beginning of the sport and to what is perhaps the greatest bicycle manual ever written, Archibald...
The First Book on the Loch Ness Monster
Today we often laugh about the myths that have grown up around the Loch Ness Monster. Recalling all the hoaxes, we wonder how people could be so gullible. But when the first widely-reported...
A Portrait of Albert Einstein
Happy Birthday to Albert Einstein! The image above is a large silver gelatin print taken in June of 1921 (Portrait Sold). Einstein had just made an official visit to the United States, where he...
Knowledge is Power: Shakespeare, Bacon, & Modern Cryptography
The Shakespeare authorship controversy has been an 150-year-old battle that seems a no-win situation, but that doesn't mean there's no silver lining. In a fascinating and little-known by-way of...
Théorie de Tissage: A Remarkable Record of Early 20th-Century Silk Weaving
Fashion is everywhere, but how often do we consider the actual manufacturing techniques of the fabrics that we wear and with which we furnish our homes? How and by whom are they designed and...
Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Photographs
Among the joys of cataloguing rare books and historical materials are the serendipitous moments of discovery and connection. We recently obtained a mysterious set of 27 photographs related to the...
E. O. Hoppé: Forgotten Modernist Photographer
E. O. Hoppé, nearly forgotten, was one of the most famous photographers of the early 20th century and a leading figure in the modernist movement who was described by Cecil Beaton as “The Master”. ...
Moon Letters
As bibliophiles, how often do we stop to consider the ways sightless people experience books and reading? Prior to the mid-nineteenth century few options existed for the blind; several systems of...
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