Back from deepest Cornwall, which among other things has incredibly elegant gravestones:
As well as some pretty crazy stained glass:
PS Apologies to anyone who's tried to comment recently: I had to turn them off while I was away due to a flood of robot opinions. I'll put them back on now but might have to switch them off again if the same thing happens...
The Lovett Collection of Superstitions at the Cuming Museum is a set of charms from London donated by Edward Lovett in 1916. There's a brass acorn, above, used to protect against lightning; a soldier's charm used to ward off the evil eye:
various objects to cure ailments, like a horseshoe to keep away nightmares, a bag with a child's caul used to protect against drowning:
a necklace of acorns worn for diarrhoea; bread and hair given to a dog to cure a child's whooping cough; a catskin for rheumatism:
and a mandrake root said to have curative powers:
What's most surprising is how recent all these medieval-seeming curios are - but then there's a shop in Brixton Market that sells lucky charms that look just like this one to protect sailors from drowning to this day:
I came across these pictures of a visit to the abandoned Ness Battery on Orkney at BBC Scotland's Island Blogging section. Blogger Stromness Dragon and a group of artists got to go inside this crumbling WWI military installation, where, among the rusty sheds and concrete bunkers, they came across these extraordinary paintings all over the walls of the mess hall, possibly done by the soldiers, depicting Arcadian scenes of rural English life: children in a forest, a gypsy caravan, a pub, a tea shop. The BBC Scotland site seems to be defunct now, but you can follow Stromness Dragon and the further story of the Battery here.
Happy Christmas to all.
And don't worry if your holidays turn out to be a bit short on peculiar fun: you can alway head for the Fens in January, for the Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival, where they celebrate the day after Plough Monday by taking a haystack for a walk.
The best thing on in London at the moment is Exhibition #1 at the Museum of Everything in Primrose Hill, James Brett's collection of "non-traditional art" tucked away in the ramshackle setting of an old dairy. All the work is presented with respect for its own merits, avoiding the usual dangers of an outsider-art freakshow ("Hey! Look at the crazy man's house!") Magnifying glasses hang in the main hall so you can appreciate Guo Fengyi's drawings of beings that seem to be made of swirling hair or Augustin Lesage's tiny dots - incredibly painstaking detail being a common feature. Paintings inspired by religious visions such as those of Sister Gertrude Morgan get their own little chapel, and Henry Darger's pictures of girls rescued from a storm by children with wings and horns are laid out in sequence so you can follow the story. Plus tea and cakes at the end. It's supposed to finish in December so go soon.
The Museum of British Folklore looks intriguing, although still in its early stages.
And it's now touring the country, in a very attractive caravan, inspired by a book that I've admired before.
I think we've all had enough stripper memoirs and ironic domestic goddess stuff now, thanks, so please can everyone go and have a look at the Women's Library's splendid collection of rousing suffragette banners, for a reminder that our grandmothers were made of sterner stuff.
The many samplers which the V & A has in its collection are remarkable not just for the amazing needle skillz of the very young makers, but the fact that it looks as if these girls had to embroider absolutely everything - not just the standard scenes:
but their family trees:
Geography lessons:
Even science:
Since Bibliodyssey recently did a post on Facebook in the 1750s, I feel justified in pointing at Hans Christian Andersen's Tumblr-like collections of images and words at the Odense museum.
He also had an interesting way with a papercut:
Found via airform archives.
See also:
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:
Times are hard - these days, if you want luxury you'll have to forage for it. Fed by Birds is here to help, so we bring you cocktail recipes derived from the land. Let Ray Mears drink sap; we expect something a little more exciting from the wilderness.
Vodka and Nettle Cordial
As served by Lady Strange.
100g freshly picked nettle tips
100g freshly picked young blackcurrant leaves
1 kg granulated sugar
40g citric acid
500ml boiling water
Add the sugar, citric acid and water to a large saucepan. Heat to 60 degrees C. Add the leaves and remove immediately from heat. Cover and leave for a week, stirring daily. Strain and bottle. Keep in refrigerator.
Add vodka to taste.
Hazelnut Martini
1/2lb hazelnuts, finely chopped
1 1/2 cup vodka
1/3 cup sugar
3 tbsp. water
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Hazelnut liqueur preparation:
In a glass bottle or jar, steep the chopped hazelnuts in the vodka for about 2 weeks in a cool, dark place, gently shaking the bottle every day. Gently pour the contents through a strainer or sieve, pressing hard on the nuts to release all the flavor.
Follow this by 2 strainings through slightly dampened cheesecloth or large coffee filter; loosely cover the contents with plastic wrap, since the process may take several hours.
In a very small saucepan, combine the sugar and water. Bring to a boil over moderate-high heat. Simmer uncovered for 5 minutes. Let cool to room temperature.
Stir in the vanilla. Funnel into glass bottle. Cover tightly; shake to blend. Let mature at room temperature, or slightly cooler, for at leat 3 weeks.
For martini, combine 1/2oz hazelnut liqueur with 1oz vodka with ice in a mixing glass. Strain into chilled cocktail glass and serve.
Haw liqueur
1lb haws washed and lightly crushed
6oz caster sugar
1 1/4 pint brandy
Put the berries, sugar and the brandy into clean lidded jar. Stir well. Put on the lid.
Store in a cool place for 3 months, shaking the jar daily for the first 7 days. Strain the brandy through a brewing sieve into a jug. Do not squeeze the sieve. Pour the liqueur into a clean bottle and cork.
Elderflower Champagne
5-6 Elderfower heads
2 Lemons
8 pints boiled Water
1 1/2lb sugar
2 tbsp Cider Vinegar
Put the elderflower heads and sliced lemons in a fermentation bucket and pour on the water. Leave to soak for 24 - 36 hours. Strain through a cloth or fine sieve and add the sugar and the vinegar. Stir well until the sugar is completely dissolved. It doesn't keep much longer than 3 months.
Fern Punch
Capillaire is a syrup popular in old English drinks:
Infuse 2oz maidenhair fern in 11/2 boiling water, and 2lb of loaf sugar, which pour while boiling hot on 2oz more of the fern. In 10 hours strain clear.
For the punch:
Take 1 quart of mild ale.
1 glass of white wine.
1 glass of brandy.
1 glass of Capillaire.
1 lemon.
Mix the ale, wine, brandy and Capillaire together with the juice of the lemon and a portion of the peel pared very thin. Grate nutmeg on the top, and add a bit of toasted bread.
Bibliodyssey has a great post at the moment about board games over the centuries, and among them are some that are really due for a revival. The Swan of Elegance instructs players in morality with the examples of Cruel Philip, Obstinate Sue or Polite Phoebe.
Oxford Digital Library has an exciting-sounding variation: swan-hopping
What I really want to play is the Mansion of Bliss:
Walking through the British Museum I came across this strangely modern-looking owl sculpture, actually an Aztec vessel for sacrificial offerings. Interesting to see that if you were born on 1-Rain in the Aztec calendar you were liable to turn into a deadly tlacatecolotl, or human owl. (I can't work out what that is in the Gregorian calendar but here is a fascinating article about the Aztec calendar, which begins on 1-Crocodile and goes through Ocelot and Death's Head, ending with 13-Flower.)
Owl men were also popular in Seventies Cornwall, it seems.
Among the curious treasures of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford is this preserved onion, supposedly used for sympathetic magic - which is not as kindly as it sounds. Anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor produced it as evidence of wizardry done by the landlord of the Barley Mow pub in Rockwell Green, Somerset, in 1891. This essay on the onion has the full story, along with other tales attached to a witch's ladder made of cock feathers; an infant's caul used as a sailor's charm, and a slug impaled on a thorn said to cure warts. All part of "England: The Other Within", an analysis of the collections to "gain a picture of Englishness". Pub sorcery, magic onions and lucky amniotic sacks - yes, that seems to cover it.
Thomas Weynant's Early Visual Media site has these beautiful examples of scenes from 18th century peepshow boxes. The luminous effect was achieved with cutout areas backed with tissue paper, and candles or daylight shining behind them.
Anyone with any sense likes to knit, and one of its greatest pleasures is discovering new and strange ways of doing things. Designers such as Sandra Backlund (above) are currently pushing knitwear into all kinds of unexpected directions, but even among the V & A's store of wartime knitting patterns you can find small innovations, like the ears-free balaclava - ideal for mobile phone addicts in cold climates:
Or to be really modern you can always extend who you knit for - how about trees:
(Janet Morton, via)
Or giants:
In need of a little colour in your life? Go and look at the Smithsonian collection of seed catalogues:
There's something very appealing about a window display that someone once worked hard on, now preserved in an old photograph, often along with the hungry faces pressed against the window. These pictures are from all over the place, I'm afraid, but primarily the English Heritage Viewfinder site and the Library of Congress. Although the first - and best - was created by my grandfather for a grocer's shop in Gloucestershire: I've already written about it at my other place.
Among the online collections of Indiana University I found the Jane Johnson Manuscript Nursery Library, a set of cards made by Jane Johnson in Lincolnshire for the instruction of her son, George William Johnson. Since he went on to be High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1784, all the careful work she put in to teaching him obviously paid off. Some of the cards demonstrate the alphabet:
Some teach sets of words:
Some tell strange little tales:
and some give very useful advice:
I came across this strange album of "dessins en cheveux" by P. Florentin in the NYPL Digital Gallery. As far as I can gather, they are mainly designs for mourning jewellery made of the loved one's hair.
There is a whole society devoted to jewellery made from human hair, it turns out. If you're really interested, you can visit a hair museum, or even commission your own new design.
The Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks Dance Collection features the artist's extraordinary sketches and paintings of dancers, notably Anna Pavlova in a variety of magnificent costumes.
Created by 18th-century German mapmaker Matthäus Seutter. Seutter seems to have the most amazing colours in all his maps.
A visit to the British Museum always raises the important question: who had the best jewellery? Was it the Romans:
Merovingian betrothal rings have a lot of charm:
The Egyptians are strong contenders, with a necklace decorated with gold flies:
18th-century England had a good line in spooky mourning jewellery:
Although they might be trumped by 16th-century Italians, who were happy to wear a rock crystal engraving of Tityus having his liver eaten by birds:
The 'Ram in a thicket' from the Death Pit of Ur might not strictly qualify as jewellery, but it does have gold genitals, copper ears and a fleece made of lapis lazuli. Also nice knees:
It's good to discover new ways of decorating yourself, such as this Etruscan ear cover:
But when it comes down to it, you can't beat a Viking hoard:
More Chinese cutouts, found in a basement in Chinatown, Soho.
I don't know why, but I find these notations of various dance steps, from baroque to Morris dances, very appealing, although completely incomprehensible. Perhaps it's the idea that to someone these complicated symbols and figures actually mean "Hop, wiggle, skip here".
Anyone about to visit England for the first time will be glad to find that we still like to spend our weekends in much the same way as in these photographs from the English Heritage site:
Sleeping it off
Visiting miniature villages
Sailing tiny boats
Queueing up to stare at a wet dog
Searching through cardboard boxes
and angry donkey riding
There's a lot of this sort of thing as well:
Many people are familiar with London Transport’s long history of beautiful advertising posters – especially as they’ve very sensibly been reissuing some old ones recently – but you may not know that the London Transport Museum has an amazing collection online. My favourites are the ones enticing Londoners out of the city because it's bluebell/harvest/blackberry time, to leafy suburbs and further:
and sometimes much further still:
Steve at The Sneeze tells this very funny story of his attempts to uncover the truth behind an incomprehensible drawing that his dad keeps putting on his birthday cakes. And if you read all the way down, you’ll see that finally the mystery is solved. “The only reason the internet exists is for this conversation to be on it” – I agree. Via Drawn.
The Mole is a character from Czech children's cartoons which were shown occasionally on BBC2 on wet afternoons when I was small. For some reason I remember these beautifully drawn cartoons as sad and frightening, although I don't see much sign of that now – perhaps the fact that the mole has a child's voice and cries realistically made him full of too much pathos. Originally found via Russell Davies.
The Klosterarchiv Einsiedeln (found via Mrs Deane) is a collection of beautiful old glass-plate photographs put online by a Swiss Benedictine Abbey. I don't speak German but there definitely seems to be a subsection scattered through the site, which you might call Monks Mucking About:
The Corning Museum of Glass seems to be full of the most unexpected things made of glass, from mechanical theatres:
to a squid:
Curious Expeditions has a beautiful set of pictures of Japanese netsuke. These are apparently toggles that were used on traditional kimonos – but rather than simple buttons they are tiny sculptures carved from coral, horn, amber etc. My favourite is this one:
Did you know that the old-fashioned art of skywriting has been replaced by the quicker, longer-lasting and generally more modern technique of skytyping? Neither did we. Here's a film explaining how they did it in the Thirties.
Unfortunately what people write with it hasn't really progressed:
Universiteitsmuseum Amsterdam has a very educational selection of vintage public health posters - the dangers of clothes:
of lack of self-control:
something about electrical monsters:
and a 'smeer of poets', sounds both dangerous and disgusting:
The worst ones are the British anti-syphilis ones, not reproduced here - I can't look at a picture of a nun holding a sad baby so don't ask me.
Continue reading "Blacken Egg on Day You Have an Accident" »
Take Campo's Infallible Specific. How could you go wrong? And what wouldn't I give for half a pint of Elegant Bandoline. Actually I think that's some kind of hair ointment but it sounds delicious. I'm afraid I've forgotten where I found these assorted pharmaceutical ads: if it was your site, please let me know.
From Penny Postcards, via.
A lot of these towns look like they could be the setting for this book
Mechanically embroidered banners for friendly societies, from this site. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger image.
