Tag Archive: 0germany

In his A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor writes that ‘you can hardly turn on the radio or open a newspaper these days without being bombarded by yet another anniversary – a hundred years since this, two hundred years since that.  Our popular history seems to be written increasingly in centenaries, […]

Paste paper (Kleisterpapier in German) is a type of decorated paper in which coloured paste is brushed onto paper and then manipulated in some way before allowing to dry.  It was especially popular, particularly in northern and eastern Germany, in the second half of the eighteenth century (although the technique itself had already been around […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about language guides, and so thought I’d share another one I find particularly fascinating: This is the first edition of a book published by the Head of Modern Languages at Shrewsbury School in 1939: ‘Conversations about the New Germany—on and off parade’ (dust-jacket). The illustrations are by Phyllis […]