Happy New Year. Things have been quiet on the blog for a while, so I thought I’d post a little update. December was quite busy, catching up with cataloguing and working on some new compositions. A new list of recent acquisitions should be out later in the month, and I am also pleased to report […]

Something a little seasonal: this mezzotint reproduces Bartolomé Esteban Murillo‘s Rest on the Flight into Egypt. It is the work of James Walker (1759–1822), who had been recruited to go to Russia in 1784, where he was appointed engraver to Catherine the Great.  ‘Walker’s principal task was to engrave important pictures by old and contemporary […]

Sometimes, as a bookseller, you get the chance to buy back a book you have sold before. This happened to me just recently, and here is the book, a wonderful collection of caricatures of leading lights in contemporary Russian theatre, ballet, and opera, from 1916. I sold this copy in 2015 and have not seen […]

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 […]

This is another post (one of a series) about pieces of music I have written. This week it’s the turn of The Little One, which I wrote back in 2009 for the Senior Choir of Dr Challoner’s High School, just up the road in Little Chalfont. It came about after the Choir of St John’s […]

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 […]