A Keeper of London's Secret History: The Entrance To The National Portrait Gallery.A sensational shooting, vandalism by a hatchet-wielding suffragette, and an all-out war on rats. These are some of the surprising events revealed in the newly cataloged archive of the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery. In February 2010, the gallery made public previously secret files covering the 150 year history of its Heinz Archive and Library. The gallery has simultaneously begun a digitization program to create an online, searchable database of those records. Archivist Charlotte Brunskill said: "There are some fascinating stories in our archives and we are making...
Dark Days In The City Of Light
Paris, 1910 At The Onset Of The Flood. (All Images Courtesy Of Bibliotheque Historique de la ville de Paris.)One of the world's most uniquely beautiful cities is nearly destroyed by a catastrophic natural disaster. Images of entire neighborhoods under water, desperate residents struggling to survive, and landmark buildings swimming in swirling water hit newspapers around the globe. Sounds like New Orleans under seige by Hurricane Katrina, doesn't it? But this description also fits Paris in January 1910. The Bibliotheque Historique de la ville de Paris has opened a new exhibit of over 200 photographs, postcards, maps, and newspapers documenting a...
A Doctor’s Donations Make Medical History
TRAVERS, Benjamin. A synopsis of the diseases of the eye, and their treatment.3rd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1824).(Dr. Richard Travers is a direct descendant of the author.)An instructional manual for a 1901 version of Viagra and a pamphlet denouncing it as a fraud, a banned play about female sexuality and the published love letters of the playwright, and a volume on venereal disease by a surgeon who may have deliberately infected himself with gonorrhea. These are just a few of the intriguing items found in an enormous collection of rare books and ephemera on the history...
A "Read" Letter Day For Dickens
Mr. Charles Dickens's Last Reading.(George C. Leighton for The Illustrated London News, Vol.56, 1870.)Of the greatest writer of the Elizabethan age, William Shakespeare, so little is known that many doubt him to be the true author of his incomparable plays. At the other end of the biographical spectrum is the greatest writer of the Victorian age, Charles Dickens. As British writer Simon Callow put it: "Of Shakespeare, we know next to nothing; of Dickens we know next to everything." The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. added a little more to that knowledge on January 27, 2010 when they announced...
Angels And Demons Reunited At Morgan Library
Hours of Catherine of Cleves, in LatinIlluminated by the Master of Catherine of ClevesThe Netherlands, Utrecht, ca. 1440(Images courtesy of Faksimile Verlag Luzern.) The first page of Catherine's prayer book foreshadows her troubled marriage. Her coat of arms as the Duchess of Guelder is centered beneath the Virgin Mary. Traditionally, her husband's crest would be illustrated atop her coat of arms. But Catherine defiantly places an Ox-- the symbol of The House of Cleves--above the emblem. Catherine is pictured praying from her Book of Hours at lower left. Her ancestors' coats of arms decorate the corners of the pages.It's every...