Portrait of the Artist As A Frontiersman: Joseph Bevier Sturtevant.(All photos by J. Sturtevant, Courtesy of Boulder Historical Society Local History Collection, Carnegie Branch Library.)Joseph Bevier Sturtevant was a prolific photographer who settled in Boulder, Colorado in 1876. That much is certain. On December 30,2009 according to the online Colorado Daily, Boulder's Carnegie Library got nearly 1,600 pictures to prove it. The photos, donated to the local history collection, are in black and white, but they were taken by one of the Colorado city's most colorful citizens: a fraudulent frontiersman known as "Rocky Mountain Joe." Most of Joe's local color...
Christie’s Poison Pen Inspires Garden
A Plaque Honoring Agatha Christie At Torre Abbey.It is a quiet killer. Portable, difficult to detect, easy to use, and you can grow it right in your own backyard. We're talking poison. A favorite weapon of the fair sex, enabling even the daintiest femme fatale to dispatch a hulking muscleman twice her size. Perhaps this is why the queen of mystery writers, Agatha Christie, was so partial to it: poison is the method of choice for murderers in nearly half of her 66 detective novels, and in many of her 100 short stories.Torre Abbey, Torquay, Devon.Christie herself said in They...
Lost Souls Are Contained In "The Library of Dust"
Canister #55-559(All Photos By David Maisel.)"Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end."-Jack Kerouac.The crematorium, autopsy room, and hallways of an outbuilding at the Oregon State Hospital, formerly known as "The Insane Asylum," need to be cleaned. Not exactly a plum assignment. So a prisoner from a nearby penitentiary has been brought in for the job. He's perfect for it. He has no choice. But even the man in prison blues balks at entering one room. When its long-locked door is opened by a visiting photographer--fittingly one of those crazy artist...
Travel Writers Conjure Up "Magical Libraries"
Boston Copley Public Library. Boston, MA.Travel writers and adventurers Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras have assembled a gorgeous gallery of photographs depicting the world's most magnificent libraries on their website, Curious Expeditions. The pictures are from a wide variety of sources, including reader contributions, and selections show that glorious groves of books are in full bloom worldwide. The gallery, Librophiliac Love Letter, proclaims: "Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library."Book Patrol has added a few quotations to enhance your viewing pleasure. Some lyrics to accompany what Goethe called the "frozen music"...
Dutch Treat: Library’s Documents Reveal City’s Scandalous Secrets
Pieter Schenk. View of New Amsterdam, ca. 1702.(New York Public Library Digital Archive.)History records it was a city founded by sober, God fearing church-goers seeking religious freedom. A colony ruled by conservatives who thought gambling, the theater, sex outside of marriage, colorful clothing, and even celebrating Christmas were immoral. But what if it was all a whitewash? An attempt to hide the secret history of the earliest settlers: pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, adventurers, and fortune seekers. Free thinkers for whom even the most liberal city in Europe wasn't liberal enough? That's the truth being revealed about the city of Manhattan by...