19th Century Body Language

My latest dump find is this lovely book titled Gesture and Pantomimic Action by Florence A[bigail] Fowle Adams. It is a second edition published in 1891 illustrated with line drawings and photographs.

Someone used this ticket as a bookmark:

North Station at Night, 1908

Here's a night time view of North Station in Boston, Mass. I love the way the full moon illuminates the clouds. The lights inside the buildings look like flames! It's interesting to compare this view with the daytime shot that I posted earlier. Today's card depicts the station before the "T" was constructed. Wishing you all a happy Postcard Friendship Friday!

Irene

One of the projects I have in mind for the new decade is to do more family portraits in collage. I've got a couple to add to the series on my grandmother Blanche, and I have a drawing of my daughter that I did for batik way back when which will translate well.

I have another batik drawing (along with a photo of the finished batiked wall quilt) of my mother Irene. I recently found her elementary school photo, above.

It's a New Decade, Isn't It

I loved 2008: a two and four circles. Very calming to write. Soothing, somehow. Emphasis on the "write" as you don't get the same theraputic effect from your keyboard as you do from your pen. 2009 was nice, also, especially if the nine was written from the bottom up to form an energetic sort of spiral. It will take me a while to adjust to 2010. It seems very choppy so far.

The terrible winds have died down enough to light the wood stove. I wrote the first half of this post while sitting close to it warming my knees. I usually compose at the computer keyboard as I am for this second paragraph. The computer is in the room furthest from the wood stove and the heat hasn't made it up here yet. I guess it would be nice to have a laptop.

Postcard From the Edge or Back From the Dead?

Found in a book from the dump. I'm offering this up as an 2-day early post for Postcard Friendship Friday!

Elementary Color by Milton Bradley

Books about color are fascinating to me. I've collected a few over the years and one of my favorites has to be Milton Bradley's Elementary Color published in Springfield, Mass. in 1895 by the Milton Bradley Co. The color chart opposite the title page, a thing of beauty, is made from 126 individual squares of Bradley Educational Colored Papers.

In these two charts of color scales two distinct classes of color are represented, namely, pure colors and broken colors. The pure colors consist of the purest possible pigmentary imitations of spectrum colors, with their tints and shades, and the broken colors are those pure colors dulled by the admixture of neutral grays in various tones. (p. 40.)

The book, an ex-library copy that never circulated, has lovely endpapers and illustrations.

Born in Vienna, Maine, in 1836, Milton Bradley set up the first color lithography shop in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, established in Springfield in 1860. He also invented the paper cutter. He produced and marketed a board game called The Checkered Game of Life, and by 1861, had sold more than 45,000 copies of his game. He formed Milton Bradley and Company in 1864 to print other games and game manuals. The company is now a division of Hasbro.

Baking Christmas Pie

My cousin Michael send me the most marvelous Christmas card. The picture is of my grandmother, Blanche making pies in her kitchen at 29 St. Peter Street in Salem, Mass.

My grandmother baked a fabulous apple pie! My grandfather loved music and there are his records on top of what looks like my grandmother's sewing machine. I remember the kitchen chairs and the flowered canister set.

You can see the canisters again in one of the photos from this post written earlier about the wonderful house and how it was saved from the wrecking ball. And I also should mention that the baby in the photo at the bottom of the earlier post turns out to be me. My cousin Kathy, standing to the right of the high chair, told me so.

Thanks, Michael, for sending such a thoughtful holiday gift full of wonderful memories!

"World of Girls" Dot

For Good Little Boys and Girls

Here's a santa from a lovely old alphabet book as a substitute for a holiday postcard for this weeks Postcard Friendship Friday!

Faneuil Hall, Boston

Here's an oversized view of Faneuil Hall in Boston, a "Lusterchrome" Giant Post Card. The back reads:

Affectionately called "The Cradle of Liberty", Faneuil Hall was the focus of Revolutionary movement in Boston and the colonies. It was built in 1742 by Peter Faneuil and given to Boston as a Town Hall.

Happy Postcard Friendship Friday to everyone!

The Inland Printer, Etc.

I was excited to see a nice selection of covers from The Inland Printer on MagazineArt.org. The Inland Printer was the first magazine in America to change its cover with every issue and, in association with designer Will Bradley beginning in 1894, it was influential in popularizing Art Nouveau.

Another cool site I found through MagazineArt.org is a blog about chromolithography. Some beautiful examples can be found there. And one more interesting blog is the Antique Prints Blog written by the owner of the Philadelphia Print Shop.

Scientific American

With my love of old scientific apparatus, I was excited to find a couple of sites showing pages from 19th century issues of Scientific American: A Weekly Publication of Information, Art, Science, Mechanics, Chemistry and Manufacturers. The first Scientific American was issued August 28, 1845.

One of the sites is MagazineArt.org (vintage magazine cover and advertising art from the golden age of American illustration), and if my link works it should take you to an amazing illustration of an early machine gun cleverly mounted to the back of a camel from the first page of the March 2, 1872 issue.

The second site is called Scientific American Past. Issues date from 1870 to 1931 with a few gaps. There you can read the history of Scientific American extracted from the five volume A History of American Magazines by Frank Luther Mott. There is a .99 cent per image fee for high resolution printable image files and articles.

Book Collector's Terminology

I just discovered Traditions & Culture of Collecting: A Course in Correct Cataloging, or Notes to the Neophyte and A Second Course in Correct Cataloging on Jeremy Norman's site about the history of science, medicine and technology:

These two humorous handbooks or glossaries of terms for antiquarian booksellers, originally written and published in 1958 and 1962 by San Francisco antiquarian bookseller David Magee, should still evoke howls of delight from any dealer, collector or librarian familiar with the day-to-day problems of the book trade.

The illustrations above are from my oldest book find. All but pages 145-376 are missing. The edges are extremely worn. Or, I should say: “show extreme evidence of great devotional love by former owner.” Some of the words have "f" in place of "s" as in the word "fin" [for sin] and the first word of the next page appears at the bottom of the one previous. The sermons are dated 1688-1691.

Manners & Customs of the Bible

I found a 1972 reprint of James Midwinter Freeman's 1875 Handbook of Bible Manners and Customs. The illustrated text is subtitled: A Complete Guide to the Origin and Significance of our Time-Honored Biblical Tradition. It is well indexed, illustrated with lovely engravings, and includes a three page list of authoritative 19th century sources for further study.