Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
24th January 2022
For some time, I’ve been aware that lithography seems to have been a useful medium for amateur women artists in the nineteenth century. I blogged once before about one such artist, Josepha Hart Gulston, and I thought I’d share a couple more examples I recently came across. This volume, entitled ‘Morning Hymn’ on the cover […]
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14th January 2022
Adelheid von Stolterfoth (1800–1875) was best known for her Rhenish poems; Goedeke called her ‘the true poet of the Rhine’. This is a copy of the first edition of The Rhenish Minstrel, published in Frankfurt by Carl Jugel in 1835, a version of her book Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis which Jugel had brought out the same year, […]
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3rd December 2021
Something a little seasonal: this mezzotint reproduces Bartolomé Esteban Murillo‘s Rest on the Flight into Egypt. It is the work of James Walker (1759–1822), who had been recruited to go to Russia in 1784, where he was appointed engraver to Catherine the Great. ‘Walker’s principal task was to engrave important pictures by old and contemporary […]
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18th November 2021
Sometimes, as a bookseller, you get the chance to buy back a book you have sold before. This happened to me just recently, and here is the book, a wonderful collection of caricatures of leading lights in contemporary Russian theatre, ballet, and opera, from 1916. I sold this copy in 2015 and have not seen […]
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12th November 2021
Earlier this week, a tweet of mine received more attention than most: As well as the retweets, I even got a comment from Siemens themselves, saying this was the only time they’d ever produced anything in Latin (unsurprisingly, perhaps). Speyer Cathedral is the largest surviving Romanesque church in the world (and now a UNESCO World […]
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20th October 2021
I’ve been dipping into a book by Franz Reitinger called Die blaue Epoche: reduktive Farbigkeit im Rokoko (2016), which explores the fashion, between about 1730 and 1765, for printing mezzotints using blue ink. It wasn’t something I’d really been aware of before, but I have always found the colour, Prussian blue, quite captivating. I only […]
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