Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
15th January 2020
For those of you following our social media this week, you may have noticed a bit of a floral theme; more specifically, we have been posting a short series of botanical illustrations from William Curtis’s The Botanical Magazine: or, Flower-Garden displayed … (London, Fry & Couchman ‘for W. Curtis, at his Botanic Garden’, 1787). This […]
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19th May 2016
At the London International Antiquarian Book Fair next week, I shall be featuring a number of books printed on coloured paper on my stand. Here’s a sneak preview of one: The Semiquaver was a charming privately-printed magazine, produced in 1869–70, in which each issue was lithographed on a different shade of vibrantly coloured paper. The writer/editor was a […]
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5th November 2015
Just over a year ago, I wrote about the first photographic manual in the world, written in 1839 by the Austrian writer Karl von Frankenstein (1810–1848). I’d love to find another copy of that book, but I shall have to content myself for the moment with this, a complete run of the first year of a journal Frankenstein […]
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21st May 2013
The boom years of 1890s Russia came to an abrupt halt at the turn of the century when an economic slump left many of the new urban working class jobless and led to unrest in the countryside. The Tsar’s popularity took another knock when hopes of a quick military victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904) […]
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31st January 2012
In 1800, the Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires, one of the most important French newspapers, politically and intellectually, of the time (by the end of the Empire, it had 23,000 subscribers), was the first paper to introduce a feuilleton, to provide its readers with non-political news, reviews, criticism and gossip. It was the brainchild […]
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