november 20 2023
a public domain round-up
i spent a while the other day poking around the public domain review website for a project. here's some of my favorite things i found there!
woodcut diagram from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708)
It is enough that [man] be as one of the towers or houses among the dwellings of a walled city, as bars and gates, as I have shown you the pattern of the house and the pattern of its instruments, as the House of the Soul, for he has lower, second and a third stories, and an attic and roof above, and walls round about, and corners of the house.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi's The Sea Monk (ca. 1845)
Against the roar of the waves the apparition asks, "Name the most horrible thing you know!" [The sailor] Tokuzo yells in reply, "My profession is the most horrible thing I know!" The answer apparently satisfies the monster as he then disappears along with the storm.
Halloween Postcards, ca. 1900–1920
one of the best collections of vintage halloween cards i've come across! the source links on public domain review also lead to some amazing collections — here's more from the digital maryland website (most of which, apparently, come from my own local library's collection!
Your Flannelette Cure: Fire Tests with Textiles (1910)
there's something really beautiful about these pictures of fabric burning tests. even though they're purely practical in their application — clothing in the 1800s to early 1900s was super flammable, which made it really important to find fireproof alternatives, so these photos documented the research into figuring that out.
R. C. Kedzie, Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers (1874)
an absolute gem of a find!! this is a 192 page book documenting samples of old arsenic wallpapers from the 1800s.
How many women have thus “gone into a decline,” I will not venture to guess. Perhaps a consideration of the “delicate state of her lungs” leads her to confine herself to her room, and the fear of “taking cold,” to avoid all ventilation; and thus she breathes constantly an air loaded with the breath of death. . . . and finally succumbs to consumption, — a consumption of arsenic in every breath she inhales!
Ennemond Alexandre Petitot's Mascarade à la Grecque (1771)
delightfully whimsical blendings of architecture & costume that i'm absolutely in love with
+ more: the spirit photographs of william hope / plague doctor costumes / curiosities from the museum of giovanni carafa (1778) / 16th century pattern book for scribes / [nsfw] photograph collection of Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), a German-Austrian psychiatrist and early sexologist / the 25 stages from courtship ot marriage
july 2023, week 3
today i discovered searchsystem, which has a huge archive of historical material (posters, logos, technology, architecture, etc) that can be sorted by year! it only goes back to 1950 (mildly disappointing to me, as a person who loves historical ephemera from the late 19th/early 20th century especially), but it's a really impressive resource and i wish i'd found it before doing my last comic project, which involved a lot of 1950s research.
a friend posted on bluesky last week about morbid anatomy's online lecture events, and i immediately signed up for five of them. a bunch of them are free and they cover really interesting topics! i went to the first one i signed up for (a lecture on depictions of blackness in mid-1900s comic books) earlier this week and it was fascinating; i'm super excited for more.
on the subject of lectures: cooper union has a ton of recordings of past typography lectures posted for free online that i'm excited to dive into.
july 2023, week 2
i recently listened to a three-episode series of the podcast you're wrong about, in which the host and carmen maria machado (one of my all-time favorite authors) talk about go ask alice, a book i have not read and didn't really know much about prior to listening. they discuss lesbian subtext, the impact of scare tactics around drugs on governmental policy, teenage girlhood, and diaries as a storytelling form.
neonaut's page on cyber mauseoleums reminded me of the article what lies beneath: the internet is decaying all around us by laura maw for the defunct mag real life. both are super worth reading.
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