Tag Archives: Books

1832: The Destructive Sphinx

Posted on August 22, 2020 by

Illustrations from The Book of Butterflies, Sphinxes and Moths; illustrated by one hundred and forty-four engravings, coloured after nature; in three volumes (Thomas Brown, 1832-4)                  

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1629: The Most Trivial Disagreements

Posted on August 15, 2020 by

Such personal correspondence and diaries as survive suggest that social relations from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries tended to be cool, even unfriendly. The extraordinary amount of casual interpersonal physical and verbal violence, as recorded in legal and other … Continue reading →

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1592: More Books on Books

Posted on August 11, 2020 by

All I can say is that you can feel from experience that so many interpretations dissipate the truth and break it up. Aristotle wrote to be understood: if he could not manage it, still less will a less able man … Continue reading →

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1808: Squares Eight Times Eight

Posted on July 29, 2020 by

It was a fancy of the eccentric Mr. Pratt…to propose a game of Chess to a friend after dinner without Chessboard and men, and stipulate that instead of describing the moves with the usual prosaic abbreviations, a sort of poetical … Continue reading →

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1933: Dreams of the Third Reich

Posted on May 26, 2020 by

A selection from Charlotte Beradt’s Dreams of the Third Reich. Beradt was a journalist in Germany when Hitler took power and, inspired by the first dream below “set out to collect the dreams the Nazi regime had generated”—which she did … Continue reading →

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1802: The Eagle

Posted on April 24, 2020 by

William Blake: Headpiece to “The Eagle,” an illustration for William Hayley’s Ballads Founded on Anecdotes Relating to Animals (1802).

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1966: Dublin Sky

Posted on April 19, 2020 by

Evelyn Hofer: Dublin Sky (1966); from Dublin: A Portrait (1967).

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2018: memo for labor

Posted on April 15, 2020 by

memo for labor you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from the transit from the war from the schools from the prisons from the … Continue reading →

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1605: Not the Author of Don Quixote

Posted on April 12, 2020 by

According to Miguel de Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes is not the author of Don Quixote. Nor was the book written in Spanish. Rather, Cervantes tells us, the true author is Cid Hamete Benengeli, the book was written in Arabic, and … Continue reading →

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1924: The Diamond Palace

Posted on April 4, 2020 by

Diamantový zámek visí nad červeným mořem… (O zlatých zámcích.) Illustration by Artuš Scheiner for a collection of Fairy Tales by Božena Němcová (1924). The first line of the caption means “the diamond palace hung over the red sea,” and I … Continue reading →

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