Fed by Birds

I defy anyone to read Fancy Dresses Described or What to Wear at Fancy Balls, 1887, without hurrying off to run up one of these costumes immediately.

To dress up as Air: "A white tulle or gauze dress... the lower skirt is dotted about with silver swallows, the upper covered with a variety of insects. Head-dress, a gold weather-vane." You should also find room on there for a windmill, a bellows and horn.

Queen of the Beetles involves "Short black skirt with horizontal stripes of red and yellow; a black pointed cap, the whole covered with ever-moving toy beetles."

The Suez Canal is easier: "Long flowing robe of cloth of gold, with waves of blue satin bordered with pearls..."

I think my favourite is Dusk: "Dress of dull grey, muslin or gauze, silver ornaments and smoked pearls, a bat on shoulder."

Express sounds challenging: "Miniature steam engine in flowing hair... wheeled skates for shoes."

These are sweet: Glowworm: "Evening dress of light brown satin with an electric star in the hair." Bullfinch: "Grey shoes with red heels and grey stockings with red clocks." Amphitrite: "Silver tunic with shells, coral and seaweed."

You can also dress as Night on the Bosphorus, A Basket of Violets, The Cotton Trade, Etruscan China, The Post Office - "On the skirt the different rates of postage, times of posting, names of several mails" - and The Family of the Vicar of Wakefield. Winners, all of them.

Male partygoers don't come off too well, unfortunately: they can wear "Evening dress of the future", ie white instead of black, or dress like "an Irish car-driver" - patches - or "the tall gamekeeper in Pickwick" - corduroy trousers. Hard cheese.

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Current reading: Shell Life: An Introduction to the British Mollusca by Edward Step. If you want the full information about plumed slugs or hairy sea lemons, or just a picture of some whelk teeth, then this is the place to come:

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Fans of Georgian London, bawdy satire or fun in general will want to get hold of Regarding Thomas Rowlandson, an account of the rambunctious life of the great graphic satirist and watercolour artist, as quickly as possible. New facts! Colour illustrations! A few of them quite rude! (But 18th century, so it's all fine.)

(Declaration of interest: the authors are my father and brother. But don't let that stand in your way.)

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There are many reasons to like Marianne Moore:
1) Her poetry - particularly her "love of intricately shaped animals".
2) Her uniform. Not enough modern writers realise that without a tricorn hat and cape in the poetry world you are nothing. "She liked the shape of such hats, she said, because they concealed the defects of her head, which, she added, resembled that of a hop toad."
3) The fact that when the Ford Motor Company hired her to think of names for their new model, she threw herself into the task with great enthusiasm: the Anticipator! Dearborn Diamanté! Turcotinga! The Intelligent Whale! Utopian Turtletop! I'd drive any of them. Mongoose Civique! Inexplicably the fools went with the Ford Edsel instead.

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I found this book, Animal Sketches by C Lloyd Morgan, in a Norfolk bookshop. It's written for children, although Morgan seems to be a respected psychologist. It has some interesting info, eg spiders prefer the colour red and are distressed by the smell of peppermint; oysters have moustaches as well as beards. But as usual I'm looking at the pictures (by W. Monkhouse Rowe):

Who knew larks had such deadly-looking feet? Some of the illustrations are pleasantly strange:

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The main thing to think about when starting out as a writer is, do something about your name. My theory about why British women writers of the mid 20th century now tend to be underrated and neglected is that they are all called Penelope or Elizabeth, and no one can remember which is which. Muriel Spark was sly enough to have a stand-out name and so is the one who gets talked about.

To right this wrong, I've decided to embark on a campaign of sorting the Penelopes from the Elizabeths, so you don't have to.

1. Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald started writing novels in her late 50s - which is an additional reason why she gets forgotten about, people being generally pretty stupid about distinguishing one academic-looking middle-aged woman from another.

She's best known for her novel Offshore, which won the Booker in 1979, but later wrote more ambitious historical novels such as The Blue Flower, about the 18th century German poet Novalis. You can read a slightly patronising piece about her by Julian Barnes here, or an admiring one by AS Byatt here.

I'd read and not thought much about Offshore long ago, so thought I'd give her short stories a go, in her collection, The Means of Escape.

Conclusion: Odd, unsettling little stories, with settings that zip all over the place from a reclusive composer on a Scottish island to plein air 19th century artists. The one that stands out is The Axe, a funny and genuinely frightening office-based tale, with a Bartleby the Scrivener atmosphere about it. One passage made me make a small squeak out loud on the Tube, it startled me so much.

Not at all what you'd expect from the author of Moon Tiger - but then that was Penelope Lively.

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"The pure nonsense they invented was a holiday of the mind; one of the few things, like Gothic architecture, that had really never been done before. It was something to create a happy nightmare; it was something more to create a thing that was at once lawless and innocent... It was the avowal of a sport or enjoyment to which the whole mind of the people must already have been tending. The Victorian Englishman walked the world in broad daylight, a proverbially solid figure, with his chimney pot hat and his mutton-chop whiskers. But something happened to him at night; some wind of nightmare blowing through his soul and his subconsciousness dragged him out of bed and whirled him out of the window, where he rose into a world of wind and moonshine... with his whiskers waving like wings." GK Chesterton on Carroll and Lear

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Suggestion: please can all novels from now on have floor plans. How am I meant to get a clear idea of the story if I don't even know where the hell the kitchen is in relation to the library? Plus it saves a lot of time on boring descriptions.

I mean, it was good enough for the Golden Age of Detection. I particularly like these maps, above and below, in The Pit Prop Syndicate by Freeman Wills Crofts. Don't ask me why I'm reading it because I don't know. But if you like a novel where a good chunk of the action is the two heroes taking it in turns to sit in a barrel to watch pit props being smuggled, then this is for you. At least I know where the Syndicate's depot is in relation to Ackroyd and Holt's.

Why should I imagine it? It's your book, you imagine it. Naturally Len Howard knows the importance of a plan in Birds as Individuals:

And don't forget to include an accurate diagram of any chessboard, bridge hand or bell-ringing chart mentioned:

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My recently bought copy of Tallulah Bankhead's autobiography (which looks as if it's still in print) turns out to be an ideal winter evening read. She describes her notoriously rackety life without remorse: "Let's face it, my dears, I have been tight as a tick! Fried as a mink! Stiff as a goat!" "I've rejoiced in considerable dalliance, and have no regrets... I found no surprises in the Kinsey Report."

It's all done in style - at least in Tallulah's version of events, most of which sounds completely made-up, but probably isn't: "It's true I once pinwheeled along Piccadilly, but I was only answering a taunt of my companion - Prince Nicholas of Roumania. You know those Roumanian princes! Not all of them are on key." At one point, she suffers from some kind of flesh-eating virus that has doctors contemplating cutting off her upper lip to stop the infection reaching her brain, and takes the opportunity to adopt "one of those half-masks which make Moorish and Turkish maidens so provocative".

She had a lion cub called Winston Churchill, and went on the wagon to show solidarity with the British after Dunkirk (although Robert Lewis said she replaced alcohol with 'sniffing odd capsules that her sister Eugenia insisted were used to revive horses that slipped and fell on the ice').

Since she's writing in 1953, some areas are skated over - she never hints at the rumours of her affairs with famous women from Greta Garbo to Billie Holiday, although she does tackle head on the 1920s scandal about her corrupting minors at Eton (perhaps because it pretty obviously wasn't true, in spite of being investigated by MI5).

When she gives evidence against a secretary who's embezzled from her, Time magazine reported that onlookers "fully expected Miss Bankhead to pull out a small, pearl-handed revolver from her handbag and shoot both defendant and her counsel."

She didn't make many films, preferring the stage. Strangely her last role was as a teetotal religious zealot in a Hammer horror film - "the ultimate in stabbing suspense":

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A sweet teach-yourself guide to painting flowers from 1818 by George Brookshaw, published online in its entirety by the University of Wisconsin.

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If there's one thing the readers of this blog like, it's moss.

So this 1950 King Penguin book by Professor P.W. Richards might be of interest. Professor Richards complains that moss is unjustly neglected, quoting botanist John Bartram: "Before Dr Dillenius gave me a hint of it, I took no particular notice of mosses, but looked upon them as a cow looks at a pair of new barn doors."

Richards is forced to admit, 'As far as direct economic value is concerned, mosses are not of great importance.' Although in former days, he points out, they were used for stuffing mattresses and pillows in rustic areas, or to make baskets and antiseptic bandages.

He gives some tips on how to cultivate moss - water with rainwater, and avoid lime: "With these hints and a little preliminary experience, anyone should be able to embark on a successful career as a moss gardener."

The beautiful illustrations are by Johannes Hedwig from his 1787 book on mosses studied through a microscope.

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Of all the many versions of Alice in Wonderland at the Rare Book Room, I think I like this sweet 1929 one, with illustrations by Hungarian Willy Pogány (who it seems worked on everything from Djer-Kiss perfume adverts to the set design for Boris Karloff's The Mummy).

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Daily Routines is endlessly fascinating for those who work at home sometimes and can't shake off a guilty feeling that sitting in your pyjamas at noon eating a Lion Bar is not the way to Get Things Done. Nonsense! Winston Churchill got things done and his routine is the best of the lot: 7.30am substantial breakfast and working in bed, followed at 11am by rising, bathing and a weak whisky and soda in the study; 1pm three-course lunch with friends, champagne, brandy and cigars. Then a little light work or possibly backgammon, and "at 5pm, after another weak whisky and soda, he went to bed for an hour and a half."

We brush aside the up-before-dawn and 10,000 words-a-day types, and embrace those who mastered a more civilised life, such as Nabokov - Scrabble, butterfly hunts and long naps - or Truman Capote: "I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping."

I mean, whose work would you rather read, Colette - swimming, sex and regular blood transfusions from an attractive young donor - or film critic Roger Ebert - rise at 7, oatmeal, treadmill, cold shower etc. And Joyce Carol Oates's comments - "To me, wasting time isn't in my nature. I find it difficult to understand why people would deliberately waste their time" - make me determined never to read a word she's written. Most importantly, try never to sit next to the highly self-disciplined J.M. Coetzee: "A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once."

Some had more idiosyncratic routines. Auden's method, perhaps not recommended, was to take lots of speed, which he considered a "labor-saving device" in the "mental kitchen". Maybe Gertrude Stein is the one to emulate: "Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing... Miss Stein spends much of her time quarrelling with friends."

Pictures from LIFE archive.
See also Writers at Work

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This may be the best book I've ever come across. Found for 50p in a secondhand bookshop, I knew as soon as I saw the mouse footprints that it must be mine:

This 1937 guide to the "Vertebrates of Britain Wild and Domestic" by Edmund Sandars is full of tiny details of creatures' characteristics, often shown in little pen and ink diagrams. Field mouse tracks:

Cows' digestive systems:

He shows their gait:

Their skeletons:

and illustrates the varieties of the species:

No detail is too small:

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Anyone interested in perfume ought to check out A Natural History of the Senses by the poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. It was a bestseller in its day, but looks as if it might have gone out of print. Ackerman is particularly good on the neglected sense of smell, especially the scents of people from history: crusaders came back perfumed with rosewater, Napoleon was drenched in violet cologne, Walter Raleigh smelled of strawberries.

She hurtles through time and space, throwing out strange facts left and right: if you put an Indonesian flying fox in your hair (as she does, experimentally), it starts to cough because of your soapy smells. Elizabethan women would put peeled apples in their armpits till they were soaked with sweat and give them to their lovers. One of Nero's guests was smothered to death in a shower of rose petals. She's defeated in her attempt to describe the smell of a penguin, but she has got a useful way to trick deer and rabbits by disguising your human scent with mushrooms, and a 16th century recipe for a perfume that makes women beautiful forever - it involves distilled raven, talcum powder and myrtle leaves, if you'd like to give it a go.

See also:

The Art of Perfume

Pictures from LIFE.

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This 1945 King Penguin about "art as practised by artists of the people for the enjoyment of the people" has an essay by Noel Carrington (who I think was the brother of Dora) about the survival of folk art on coaches, in fairgrounds and on musical instruments. Even then he was lamenting its disappearance under the influence of mainstream culture: "I noted with regret that the lettering on a little train roundabout in which my children had embarked was in the sober sanserif type designed by Eric Gill." I like the illustrations by Clarke Hutton:

Continue reading "The Enjoyment of the People" »

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Talking of owls, a kind correspondent sent me this image from the Owles Almanacke of 1618, by Thomas Dekker, or possibly Thomas Middleton. In this mock almanac an owl makes predictions for haberdashers, grocers and ironmongers, and gives still-valid advice for the coming year, including, "Evacuate by vomit when The Sun in New Fish Street draws excellent French wines that leap up in your face." Also, "Those that would be taken for a gentlewoman must sue for shoes that creak like a frog but our shrewd dames will have dumb bottoms that they may rush upon their maids as 'twere out of an ambush."

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By Mary Reynolds, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Search the Memory of the Netherlands to see some great children's book covers.

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I didn't make it to Sunderland for If There Ever Was, an exhibition of extinct and impossible smells, for which curator Robert Blackson commissioned 14 strange scents from a team of perfume designers and botanists. Luckily this book released to accompany it brings the smells to me, in the form of paper inserts. The perfumes include a lovely recreated Edwardian scent from the Titanic, a meteorite hitting Peruvian mud, the smell of communism - some kind of institutional soap, I'd guess, with a hint of bleach - and the Mir space station, which it turns out was plagued by "the pungent odour of pickling gym socks", created by the sweat of vodka-drinking Russian cosmonauts. The rub'n'sniff technology works reasonably well, although one of the smells is so strong it seems to drown out the first few: think it's the sun's rays - "hydrogen and helium with a molten cocktail of copper, terbium, strontium, antimony and europium". Had no idea the sun smelt so terrible.

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I've just finished reading Corvus: A Life with Birds, a sort of modern equivalent of Len Howard's Birds as Individuals, in which Esther Woolfson describes her adoption of various corvids, particularly a rook and a magpie. Woolfson's book is twice as long as it should be and could do with some photographs, but I did learn some interesting bird facts from it:

1. Doves are very aggressive.
2. Crows can recognise the scientists who work with them on a campus of 40,000 people, and will follow them, shouting.
3. Birds can see twice as many colours as humans.
4. If you keep a magpie in the house, be prepared to come home and hear them imitating the voice you use on the phone.

She also has a good account of a martial arts fight between a teenage girl and a magpie, which is not something you read every day.

See also:
Ravens Are Watching

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Some intriguing titles from the University of Alabama online collection (found via Wrong Distance).

All of the above would make ideal summer reading, but this last one I really would like to know more about - luckily, it's still available.

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Head Trip by Jeff Warren is a fascinating journey into different stages on the daily "wheel" of consciousness. I didn't even know some of these stages were there: I had a vague awareness that the hallucinogenic state you go into just before falling asleep is called hypnagogic, but not about the hypnopompic stage on the way out, where dreams overlap with reality.

Anyone who suffers from insomnia may find consolation in the section on sleep: Warren suggests lying awake in the middle of the night might be natural or even beneficial. In the days when people went to bed with the daylight, they had a first sleep, then all got up for the 'stirring hour' or what Warren calls 'the Watch', chatted, had sex, wandered around or just mulled over their dreams, and went back for a second, different sort of sleep in the early hours. When Warren goes off to a remote hut to try the old pattern, he finds his ideas about sleep transformed: "It was a little like finding out that the home you live in is really the exposed bell tower of a vast underground cathedral."

Of course it's mainly Western industrial societies who've become slaves to the idea of eight hour sleeps - if you're a member of the Gebusi tribe in Papua New Guinea you never fall asleep at all, for fear of becoming the victim of a prank: "A favourite joke on someone who succumbs consists of dressing up in warfare gear, taking up weapons and screaming at the sleeper. If he starts out of sleep in horrified alarm, convinced he's about to be killed in a raid, the joke is viewed as an unqualified success."

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I'm always interested in the Guardian's series on Writers' Rooms - although what it mainly reveals is what depressing places most writers work in. Far too many books, piles of dusty papers and ugly office furniture. The best ones belong to people like AL Kennedy and Mark Haddon, who've noticed that they don't work in an office and are pretty pleased about it: "My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!" And those like JG Ballard who realise that if you're writing what you want is not a lot of other people's stupid books to look at, but pictures. Unless you're Rudyard Kipling, whose room is dominated by a portrait of his slave-driving wife looking disapproving, which made this grand study "a bit of a prison".

Room 26 has a great series of photos of writers actually working in their rooms - above, Edith Wharton, who is much more elegant about the whole thing and what's more is wearing a fantastic print.

Fed by Birds' workspace is of course quite different, as you see below:

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"You could dress up a pigeon in a tiny suit of evening clothes and put a tiny silk hat on his head and a tiny gold-headed cane under his wing and send him walking into my room at night. It would make no impression on me. I would not shout, "Good God almighty, the birds are in charge!" But you could send an owl into my room, dressed only in the feathers it was born with, and no monkey business, and I would pull the covers over my head and scream."

James Thurber, from The Thurber Carnival

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Back from the South of France, with some new vocab - huîtres, hirondelle, bandes desinées - and some spectacular comic books (aimed at the very small, which suits my level of French reading). Luckily this is France, so even books for the tiny are pretty sophisticated. Fennec, by Yoann, is from the stable of Lewis Trondheim, and is the story of a small desert fox looking for a cave of blood (wait, can that be right?)

Anyway, it looks beautiful.

Gedeon Grand Manitou is by Benjamin Rabier, the creator of La vache qui rit.

The plot looks a little involved, but it's all very charming.

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Actually, the first at least is still in print

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Beautiful ornithological works by John Gould, from a 1948 picture book.

Continue reading "Gould's Tropical Birds" »

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The copy of this children's book on Iceland, Lapland and Greenland which I picked up somewhere or other was won by its first owner for Early Morning Sunday School Attendance in 1884. It was published by the Wesleyan Sunday School Union, and the Wesleyan approach seems to have been a gentle and kindly one, using the stories of harsh Northern lives to remind children to "think with warm interest and sympathy of those who have fewer advantages". It has some interesting insights into Arctic life: after a black bear hunt in Lapland, the bear is taken home on a sledge "and the reindeer that has drawn it is actually so indulged as to be allowed a holiday all the rest of that year". It also has some beautiful illustrations.

Continue reading "Peeps Into the Far North" »

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I picked up this textbook from 1876 by J. Norman Lockyer, designed for schoolchildren and 'children of a larger growth', mainly for its beautiful little illustrations and diagrams.

Continue reading "Elementary Lessons in Astronomy" »

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On the edge of Romney Marsh is Rye, which might seem like a twee tourist trap but is actually the epicentre of English eccentricity. It was fictionalised as Tilling in the Mapp and Lucia books by EF Benson when he was its mayor, and these days it's piled high with bric a brac - mainly bowler hats and croquet sets and other discarded trappings of Englishness - and populated with odd and garrulous characters. This book was found in a Rye bookshop, whose owner was full of information on inbreeding in the marsh and although she'd never been to nearby Dungeness, was very much looking forward to a trip round the nuclear power station one day soon.

It's an account of how the author befriended the birds around her Sussex cottage, and made a study of their psychology and individual characters. Her accounts of how blue tits and robins would fly up and communicate with her sound a bit mad, until you see the photos:

She describes an electrician coming to the cottage, and seeing the birds coming down to perch on her:

"His whole countenance seemed to alter, his face glowed, his eyes shone and he kept murmuring: 'How wonderful!' Then he said: 'But why shouldn't it be like that? It ought to be like that.'"

So it should. I plan to adjust my working methods to look more like this:

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In Tallinn a while ago, I bought a couple of Sixties textbooks for the appealing if baffling (to the non-Estonian speaker) illustrations:

Continue reading "Estonian Schoolbooks" »

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At his best in this famous interview from the Paris Review in 1977. Interesting to see that he got an anthropology MA for Cat's Cradle, and that the idea for that book had first been rejected by HG Wells:

Continue reading "We Love Kurt Vonnegut" »

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I bought this account by a Chinese poet, calligrapher and painter of life in London in 1938 after seeing it on this site, which is full of extracts from intriguing illustrated books.

Chiang Yee is a charming, modest and funny observer of this alien world, and a man after our own heart in his enthusiasm for London parks, ducks and listening to birdsong while lying in bed. What I really got the book for was his beautiful little paintings of London scenes in the Chinese style - from deer in Richmond Park (click on images to enlarge):

early autumn in Kenwood:

morning mist in St James's park:

to Jubilee night in Trafalgar Square and Coronation night in the underground:

Continue reading "The Silent Traveller in London" »

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It's good to have this very useful method of divination clearly explained, in this book from the 1920s, as the author promises that "those who can tell fortunes are always assured of social success".

The symbolism of tea-leaf reading seems to be very specific and extraordinary: Cecily Kent provides pictures of the contents of sample tea cups to help. Eg:

As the interpretation section observes, "The symbols here speak for themselves and need no explanation”.

This cup was "turned", it says, by a well-known authoress, and its sinister appearance is accounted for by the fact that she was mentally arranging a murder for her new book at the time of the reading. Could this be... Agatha Christie's cup of tea?

This example is a bit more helpful:

Interpretation: doll plus toadstool equals a warning against a bad habit of gossiping when feeling bored in society – the stuffed head of the deer showing the distress caused by such unguarded talk.

The combination of symbols you really want is is a Rhinoceros, an Overcoat, a Steamer and a Large Letter I. This means a voyage to India, through which much will happen which will lead to you becoming famous.

I hope that's clear now.

You can still buy a paperback version of this book here

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Joris Hoefnagel, a 16th century Flemish illustrator, was commissioned by Rudolph III to illustrate this incredible model book of calligraphy by Georg Bocskay, secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, put together 30 years earlier.

Continue reading "Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta" »

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