Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
11th November 2019
The Boston Book Fair is only days away and, as the trunks have already left to go on their journey across the Atlantic, we find ourselves with a little bit of time to sit down with a nice cup of tea and write a blog post. We were pleased to be able to include in […]
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23rd April 2014
As today is the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, I thought I’d share this illustrated Victorian broadside (566 × 440 mm) celebrating the 300th anniversary, produced by Macdonald & Co’s Steam Printing Works in 1864:
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23rd April 2013
As today is Shakespeare’s birthday(/deathday), I thought I’d post a rare piece of Shakespeareana: This little book, printed in Darmstadt in 1912 in an edition of only 200 copies, is the sixth book to be produced by ‘probably the strangest private press of all time’ (Horodisch). It was run by Gottlieb von Koch (1849–1914), a […]
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3rd July 2012
Here’s fun: stickmen performing scenes from Shakespeare in 1824. The artist, Thomas Bedford, was one of Bristol’s earliest lithographic printers (‘possibly the earliest’ according to Twyman, Early Lithographed Books, p. 150); he first appears listed as lithographer in 1823, so this is an early production of his. The title is from Macbeth, but the other […]
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7th December 2011
Ludwig Devrient (1784–1832), ‘the greatest of all [German] Romantic actors’ (Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage I, 135), revelled in finding a role he could get his teeth into. He had already proved himself in Shakespeare (his chronic alcoholism notwithstanding) with Shylock and King Lear, and his appearance as Falstaff in March 1817 won universal […]
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