Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
9th February 2022
The following post was originally published on Engelsberg Ideas. In 1927 the LA Times built a show home for modern high-tech living in the new Los Angeles neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades, updating its readers with weekly progress reports. Perched in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, Villa Aurora, a large Spanish Colonial Revival-style house, was a mix of both […]
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25th September 2020
I’m currently putting together a new list of 18th-century material, and thought I’d share one item from it here. It’s two etchings of the ‘walking bookseller’, Theodora Grahn, ‘Baron de Verdion’, from 1793 and 1803. These are two versions of the much-reproduced image of Theodora Grahn/de Verdion, an émigré cross-dressing bookseller in Georgian London. The […]
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10th November 2014
I remember back in 1996, when I was living in Germany, you could still buy good-quality music scores from Editions Peters in Leipzig very cheaply. There I was, an impecunious student, scooping up cloth-bound editions of J. S. Bach’s choral works—which I still have, of course—for next to nothing. When I asked about the low prices, I was told that […]
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