Centennial Exhibition Digital Collection

Season's Greetings! to everyone. (I have taken some time off from this blog due to personal reasons which will be brought to light soon in a new collage series!)

I have just added a new reference link: 1876 Centennial Exhibition . The Centennial Exhibition Digital Collection and web site were developed by the Free Library of Philadelphia with a National Leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. I've just begun exploring the site which documents one of my favorite events in American History.


Images are from Phillip T. Sandhurst's beautifully illustrated book: The Great Centennial Exhibition Critically Described and Illustrated (Philadelphia: P.W. Ziegler, 1876).

J. W. Buel's Beautiful Paris

I'm trying to identify and old book that's missing a title page and its last pages. The cover says: The Metropolis of the World in what was once gold lettering. The book measures 11x13.25 inches and contains 366 old photographs of the city of Paris before the days of the automobile.

I believe it to be a copy of J.W. Buel's Beautiful Paris: The Splendors, Mysteries and People of the Great City published around 1895. Buel's book contains over 400 duo-tone photographs taken by Mr. A. Pepper, official photographer of the French government.

The caption to the photo with the birds reads:

GALLERY OF BIRDS, MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. - The Jardin des Plantes, or Museum of History, was founded by Guy de Labrosse in 1635; attained its international fame while the great Buffon was director (1732); and was enriched in 1805 by Humboldt's collection of 4500 different species of tropical plants. The royal menagerie was removed here from Versailles in 1793. During the seige of Paris ub 1870-71 the garden was seriously injured by the bombardment; and when the citizens were driven to extremes by famine, many of the animals were sold to the city butchers. The Museum is one of the largest in the world, containing, as it does, specimens of every known species of bird, reptile, mammal and plant, a large number of which are living. The photograph above shows the Marmottan collection of stuffed birds, in which there are 3000 specimens, located on the ground floor of the Galleries of Zoology.

In searching for information about Beautiful Paris, I found an amazing site describing the personal library of Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Collated and Researched by Bill Hillman. An Illustrated Compilation of over 1,200 Books in the ERB Library Amassed through the years 1875-1950. Presented in Over 70 Colossal Web Pages with thousands of images and zillions of pages to print out. Accompanied by Research Culled from Personal Libraries and Online Sources.

There's an interesting section on the books by J.W. Buel (he's the fourth author discussed on this page) and the title page to Beautiful Paris is shown along with a different cover. The dimensions look the same as my book.

It will take some time to work my way through the whole ERB Library so I've added it to my reference links.

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!

Boston Burial Grounds (Old Home Week)

These are for Vintage Postcards Revisited because she loves old cemeteries.

Trinity Church, Boston (Old Home Week)

The State House, Boston (Old Home Week)

Old State House, Boston (Old Home Week)

More from Old Home Week

Look out! When you hit "return" at the end of a title it publishes your post automatically.

Getting ready to scan a few old photos of Boston as a lead-in to some postcards coming tomorrow for PFF. I blogged about Old Home Week before. The book was written by James Ball Naylor and was published by the C.M. Clark Publishing Company of Boston in 1907.

But first I want to mention THIS Old Home photograph. The caption reads: "Old Chain Bridge, Newburyport, Massachusetts - First Suspension Bridge in America."

I hate to think how many times I drove over the new bridge in Newburyport unaware of this bit of history regarding the old one.

31 Cabot Street, Beverly

The box of photos that I went through last night had some pages from my old scrap book. Included was the listing for the house my parents owned when I was born. (More about the house in a previous post about Beverly, Mass.)

Here's a shot of the house before they purchased it. It looks like it was taken from inside a car parked nearby.

And here's a couple of later shots, one from the same vantage point as "before" and one of the back, after renovations. There was a beautiful spiraling staircase in the front entrance hall leading to the second floor. And the dark attic was scary and fascinating at the same time. It had a tiny hidden room behind one wall that my mother referred to as a "Money Closet."

Take Your Own Picture

Are these "Take Your Own Picture" booths still around? I haven't seen one lately! It took a while to locate these photos which were taken in the machine at Salem Willows. These are of my daughter and me, back in the early 1980's:

And here's a couple of my sister and her best friend Laurie:

Best of BoK Volume Nine

These first two plates illustrate an article titled "The Color of the Stars."

The fine print on THE LIGHT THAT EXPLAINS THE STARS TO US reads as follows:

When pure light, as from a white-hot iron, passes through a glass prism, it is broken up into seven colors, called the spectrum, as shown in the first picture. But light from the sun shows, in addition to the colors, various lines, as seen in the second picture. These lines are caused by some of the different substances that compose the sun. Although here we see only a few lines, the sun's spectrum really shows over 2,000 lines. The third picture is the spectrum of a star, Sirius, and when compared with that of the sun, it shows that the stars are made of the same materials as the sun and earth, because the lines in the spectrum for different substances always appear in the same position in relation to each other, as can be seen by comparing these spectra of the sun and Sirius. Although the spectrum color of the metal sodium is yellow, as in the fourth picture, this appears dark in the sun and star spectra, because of the intense light behind it, just as a gas-jet seen in front of the sun's disc appears black; but of course sodium is in the same position in all the spectra.

And HOW THE STAR LIGHT TELLS US OF WHAT THE STARS ARE MADE says:

This picture shows us how the spectroscope is used to enable men to catch the light of a star, and by passing it through a glass prism to bread up the light into various colors. As different metals give off different colors, we can in this way tell of what the stars are made. Ths picture does not show the spectroscope, but illustrates the principle.

This last illustration, A WHEEL A QUARTER OF A MILE ROUND, reminds me of a postcard that was posted recently for Postcard Friendly Friday. The caption reads:

Some of you have seen this gigantic wheel which used to be at Earl's Court in London. This was not the first great wheel to be built. An American engineer, Mr. G. W. Ferris, had seen those curious little upright roundabouts that come to the country fairs, and he thought out the idea and built for the World's Fair at Chicago a big wheel of iron that carried 1,440 people at one time. Then the Earl's Court wheel was built, and this was much more wonderful that the other. It was 300 feet across, and the towers that supported it were 175 feet high. The axle, weighing 54 tons, was hollow, and people could walk through it from one side to the other while the wheel was going round with its 1,600 passengers. The great wheel was turned by a big engine that needed only one man to work it.

Little Scenic Views of N.H. - Part II.

Here's the second installment (check out the first installment here) of my little New Hampshire photos measuring 1.75 x 2.75 inches. Each one is numbered on the back in pencil.

No. 11 - Flume Cascade, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 12 - Ammonoosuc Upper Falls

No. 13 - Lower Ammonoosuc Falls, White Mountains, N.H.



No.14 - Echo Lake, Franconia Notch, N.H.



No. 15 - 42. The Flume, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 16 - Eagle Cliff, Franconia, N.H.

No. 17 - Indian Head Camping Ground, White Mountains

No. 18 -Glen Ellis Falls, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 19 - Mt. Willey, Crawford Notch, N.H.

I think my favorite from this group is the shot of the old Indian Head Camping Ground. Those tents behind the automobile remind me of the ones we used to sleep out in at Camp Paradise with the Girl Scouts. They leaked in the rain, blew down in the middle of the night, and make todays ultra-light improvements seem like nothing short of a miracle!

Another interesting detail is the appearance of the numerals 42. on what was marked No. 15. I guess this is a portion of a larger set of images. Happy to be part of this Postcard Friendship Friday!

Longest Covered Bridge in the World

Here's a picture of my mother, Irene, taken around 1940 standing in front of the "Longest Covered Bridge in the World." I love the jagged edges of the photo.

I wonder if this speed limit is still in effect today? This is in response to Mary Tomaselli's post on New Brunswick Covered Bridges for Postcard Friendship Friday!

Little Scenic Views of N.H. - Part I.

I bought a set of tiny New Hampshire photographs some years ago in an antique store up in Ossipee for the picture of the Old Man. Here are the first ten in a set of nineteen. They measure 1.75 x 2.75 inches. Each one is numbered on the back in pencil.

No. 1 - Observation Tower, Indian Head, N.H.

No. 2 - The Three Bears at Indian Head, N.H.

No. 3 - The Basin, Franconia Notch, N.H.

No. 4 - Mt. Chocorua, White Mountains of N.H.

No. 5 - The Indian Head, White Mountains of N.H.

No. 6 - Old Man of the Mountains, White Mountains, N.H.

No. 7 - Hall of the Ships, Lost River, N.H.

No. 8 - The Guillotine, Lost River, N.H.

No. 9 - Crystal Cascade, Tuckerman Ravine, White Mountains of N.H.

No. 10 - The Flume Cascade, White Mountains, N.H.

So there you go, New Hampshire beautiful, even in black and white. I can see Chororua from the highway. Sadly, the Old Man is gone now, along with the Three Bears. (continue to Part II.)