Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
10th January 2012
This is a pocket guide (it’s only 106 × 69 mm) to the ‘Ermitage’ at Arlesheim, the largest English landscape garden in Switzerland, produced in 1788 for visitors who came to wander dreamily around the suitably Romantic setting. Created in 1785 by Balbina von Andlau-von Staal and her cousin, Heinrich von Ligertz, the Ermitage, or ‘Solitude […]
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29th November 2011
Six cantos, each over 100 lines in trochaic octameter, on the subject of melons was always going to be an odd book. I admit, I bought it as a curiosity because of the title, but once I’d had a chance to read it, I discovered it to be even more extraordinary than I could have […]
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