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
Anyway, it looks beautiful.
Gedeon Grand Manitou
The plot looks a little involved, but it's all very charming.
Beautiful ornithological works by John Gould, from a 1948 picture book.
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.
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.
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
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:
In Tallinn a while ago, I bought a couple of Sixties textbooks for the appealing if baffling (to the non-Estonian speaker) illustrations:
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:
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:
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
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.
