The Kelmscott Chaucer lends itself to superlatives. The first page is perhaps the most celebrated example of typography in English. It’s certainly the most famous in the context of of private press books, inspired by the skills and craftsmanship of the early printers. However, we’re not looking at a page…
Astute commentators have already noted that the 1939 Sydney Underground map is “strikingly similar” to Beck’s diagrammatic Tube map (see, for example, Claire Dobbin in London Underground Maps). It has even been suggested that this is the first straight copy of Beck’s work. Here it is: You’ll see why…
Roman love poetry this week. These two quarto volumes bound in vellum are both examples of the 1708 Broukhusius edition of Albius Tibullus published in Amsterdam by Johann Heinrich Wettstein – one of the better separate editions (Tibullus was often lumped together with Catullus and Propertius). The collation is…
Greek bucolic poetry this week, and an absolute joy it is, too. The works of Theocritus in quarto, published in Paris in 1561 by Guillaume Morel, who had succeeded Turnebus as King’s Printer in Greek in 1555. The woodcut Basilisk device (a play on the Greek “Basileus”) is on the title-page. Our copy is red-ruled…
Victorian prisons may not be such a great topic for Christmas (except for Dickens, perhaps, in one of his bleaker moods) but as usual I’m guided by the things that I’ve found. Today we have one of the original ground plans for HM Prison Holloway. It is signed by…
1892 The Land of the Almighty Dollar, a critical account of the United Sates chiefly based on the author’s travels in New York and Chicago. I’ve been dipping into it and the text is worthy of a post in itself, but I’m determined to stick to the point. I bought this…
So, the eagerly awaited (by its authors, certainly) A History of the 20th Century in 100 Maps by Bryars & Harper has now hit the shops, published by the British Library here in the UK and by the University of Chicago Press in the US. Here’s what 100 copies looks…
Leslie George Bullock (1904-1971) first cropped up on these pages a couple of years ago, in a post about pictorial maps of London. He created whimsical but informative cartoon maps for children, most notably perhaps his Children’s Map of London, originally sold in aid of Great Ormond Street: He…
It is almost a century since M.K. Gandhi returned permanently to India, in 1915. He was a London-trained lawyer in his mid forties, already possessing an international reputation after twenty years in South Africa, where he developed his theories of non violent civil disobedience. He was feted by Indian nationalists…
The London Underground is the world’s oldest underground railway. In the decade or so that I’ve been specialising in Tube maps I’ve seen spiralling interest in collecting the cartographic record of 150 years of underground travel. Hundreds of maps have been issued by London Transport, its immediate predecessor the London…