Back in April I wrote about a Gay-Z map of London, published by the Man to Man bookshop in Notting Hill c. 1977. It remains the earliest example of a separately published LGBT map of London I’ve seen, and I’m...
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,...
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...
I seem to have a good selection of atlases of the British Empire at the moment: Thematic atlases became especially popular in the later nineteenth-century, pioneered by firms such as W. & A.K. Johnston and Bartholomew. Here’s an example of...
Just for once, the answer to the question is ‘everything’. The late nineteenth century was the heyday of the thematic atlas, but I have rarely seen one quite so specialist or as magnificent as Olsen’s 1883 Piscatorial Atlas. A series...
"They cut his throat from ear to ear, his head they battered in; his name was Mr William Weare, who dwelt at Lyon’s Inn." This well-enough known fragment of doggerel has been inscribed in an early hand at the back...
For many people January is the season of moderation, and some particularly hardy souls (I’m told) even contemplate abstinence. Certain strands of the British media have coined and attempted to popularise the toe-curlingly awful term ‘Janopause’ to describe this practice,...
At last, a chance for some intensive cataloguing. Long overdue, and it stirs the blood more than somewhat when the provenance is as much fun as this. Here’s my brief description. Wolff, Joseph: Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in...
Forty copies of the new Dictionary of British Map Engravers (Laurence Worms & Ashley Baynton-Williams; Rare Book Society 2011, £125) were wheeled into my shop on Friday afternoon - after I’d explained that a forklift with a wooden pallet wouldn’t...
I threatened to come back to thematic and statistical cartography in an earlier post. It does sound like a threat – dry as dust – but actually the development of this sort of map-making in the second half of the...
THOSE THAT WILL WORK, THOSE THAT CANNOT WORK, AND THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK … Henry Mayhew identified a fourth class too – those that need not work – not his chief concern and they don’t make it onto the...
Keeping on with the theme of Victorian social history, in a recent house-call I picked up a latish edition of John Camden Hotton’sSlang Dictionary, 1885. Not of great commercial value, but irresistible. Hotton himself is fun - a bookseller, publisher...
