Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
25th May 2022
Last week, We Love Endpapers, the Facebook group I set up (now with over 7000 members!), turned six. To celebrate, I decided to put together a short list featuring various types of historic decorated paper (marbled, sprinkled, bronze-varnish, brocade, block-printed, and paste). One particularly interesting type is Carta di Varese. Perhaps the most famous Italian […]
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10th January 2019
There’s nothing better than finding a cheeky marginal doodle or two, and that’s what we found when we picked up an otherwise nondescript copy of Julius Stinde’s Buchholzens in Italien at a recent fair. First published anonymously in Berlin in 1883, Stinde’s satirical…
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7th May 2014
Although perhaps largely forgotten now, Giambattista Casti (1724–1803), Salieri’s favoured librettist in Vienna in the 1780s, was notorious in his day, with a reputation for syphilis—Pushkin later wrote of the ‘noseless Casti’ in his lyric ‘K vel’mozhe’ (‘To a Grandee’, 1830)—and ‘for writing witty, salacious satires, as a sort of obscene, Italian Voltaire. Casanova had […]
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