Not in the holiday mood yet ? Try watching this four-hour Yule log video created using wooden type cutouts. Sharp Type recreates the Christmas video staple using one of its most beloved typefaces, Ogg (get it, Yule Ogg?).
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For more than a century, London Transport has used posters to promote travel around the winter holidays. At Christmas, festive posters would appear on the network to encourage travelling via Underground for Christmas shopping or to get to winter sales, as well as simply offering passengers festive greetings.
Winter with the Gulf Stream by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The boughs, the boughs are bare enough,
But earth has not yet felt the snow.
Frost-fringed our ivies are, and rough
With spiked rime the brambles show,
The hoarse leaves crawl on hissing ground,
What time the sighing wind is low.
But if the rain-blasts be unbound,
And from dank feathers wring the drops,
The clogg’d brook runs with choking sound,
Kneading the mounded mire that stops
His channel under clammy coats
Of foliage fallen in the copse.
A single passage of weak notes
Is all the winter bird dare try.
The moon, half-orb’d, ere sunset floats
So glassy-white about the sky,
So like a berg of hyaline,
Pencill’d with blue so daintily—
I never saw her so divine.
But thro’ black branches—rarely drest
In streaming scarfs that smoothly shine,
Shot o’er with lights—the emblazon’d west,
Where yonder crimson fire-ball sets,
Trails forth a purfled-silken vest.
Long beds I see of violets
In beryl lakes which they reef o’er:
A Pactolean river frets
Against its tawny-golden shore:
All ways the molten colours run:
Till, sinking ever more and more
Into an azure mist, the sun
Drops down engulf’d, his journey done.
One of the most popular diversions in New York City during the winter holiday season is ice skating in the world famous Central Park. The skating pond in Central Park first opened to the public on December 19, 1858 and by Christmas Day, a reported 50,000 people came to the park to skate. The iconic winter pastime was captured by the artist Winslow Homer for the illustrated newspaper Harper’s Weekly.
Skating on the Ladies’ Skating Pond in Central Park, New York was drawn on a woodblock that was then cut apart, engraved, reassembled and printed as the centerfold in the January 28, 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly. The scene documents the fact that there were two distinct skating areas, the rowdy one for men and a calmer one for ladies (and men who accompanied them).
Homer immediately went to work on a variation of the scene, done in watercolor, called Skating on the Central Park, (top image) which became the first work he was invited to exhibit in New York at the National Academy of Design. The painting was so popular that the Boston master lithographer John Bufford (1844–1851), arranged to reproduce it as a color lithograph, publishing the print in 1861.
Ice skating was one of the few activities open to both men and women in 19th century New York City and was hugely popular. “Skating in a moral and social point, is particularly suited to our republican ideas as a people,” stated the handbook published by the Brooklyn Skating Rink Association.
The Currier & Ives lithograph below shows the skaters and the sleighs, sharing a snowy Central Park in the 1860s.
Visitors and residents alike can still enjoy gliding across the ice with the New York City skyline in the background. There are now two main ice-skating rinks in Central Park, each with skate & locker rentals available – Wollman Rink and Lasker Rink. A third (free) option is also available at Conservatory Water when proper ice conditions permit.
Up until quite recently, I was a habitual buyer of postcards during my travels. Mind you, I rarely ever sent the postcards to anyone, but rather keep them as reminders of the places that I had visited. When I was young, postcards were often a substitute for souvenirs. In more recent years, when I stopped carrying a camera on my travels, postcards replaced the pictures that I would have taken.
Just this week, I learned of the upcoming publication of Postcards The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network by Lydia Pine from the University of Chicago Press. Needless to say, I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of the book, which introduces us to the analog antecedent to today’s travel Tweets, Instagrams, and Facebook posts. Although postcards are usually associated vacation pleasantries they allowed travelers to send and receive messages around the world inexpensively. They were always about the personal connections between people. Pyne’s book examines postcards on an international scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.
Here’s an exerpt from the publisher:
Postcards have been printed, sold, mailed, and received on a scale that makes them, historically, the largest class of artifacts that humankind has ever exchanged.
There are a lot of different ways to dig into the history of postcards and any history will inevitably be incomplete. Although postcards were a mass medium, they were—and still are—a disposable one. This disposability means that there are holes in the historical record, making a complete archive of all the world’s postcards inherently impossible. Many histories of postcards opt to explore postcards through specific pictorial or geographic themes (“historic postcards of New York City”) or printed types (“American holiday postcards.”) These narrow, specific approaches tend to focus on postcards by a particular manufacturer, such as the iconic Curt Teich & Co. Americana postcards or the carefully lithographed portraits found on cards by London printer Raphael Tuck & Sons. Others opt to concentrate on specific postcard technologies, like Kodak’s “real picture” postcards. As many types and styles as there are of postcards, there is an equal number of ways to talk about their histories.
Throughout this project, I’ve learned at first hand that postcards are personal and always have been. I didn’t start out to write a book that drew so heavily from collections of family postcards or to highlight my own different postcard experiences. But, completely unexpectedly, the medium lent itself to this approach, as postcards require us to recognize that global social networks are built out of individual stories and connections. The more I dug into stories about postcards, the more I found myself and my family in them.
For example, my own great-grandfather, Robert Boles, saved a shoebox full of hundreds of postcards that were sent to him between 1905 and 1920—what historians call the Golden Age of Postcards. His daughter, my grandmother, kept the cards for years and gave them to my mom, who has long been interested in family history from my dad’s side of the family. My mom bequeathed the postcards to me when I started the background research for Postcards, convinced that these family mementos would offer a way to humanize the global postcard phenomenon. She was right.
To that end, reading postcards in various libraries and archives felt a bit as though I was reading messages in bottles; I didn’t know the recipient or the sender, and the message on the back would have made sense only to them. To put it another way, it was like reading a stranger’s text messages and trying to figure out the backstory for any individual text. Drawing on postcards from my family’s collection meant that I “knew” the people writing, receiving, or saving the postcards in a way that I couldn’t with postcards from other institutional collections. It continued to make postcards personal.
Postcards have left an indelible imprint on the history of human communication, unmatched by any other material medium. They owe their success to the decentralization of their manufacture as well as the physical material connection they created between sender and recipient. Postcards and their digital descendants continue to be about personal connections—specifically, short, cheap, ephemeral messages. There are inexorable echoes of postcards in contemporary digital picture networks such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and other photo-sharing apps. We recreate old social networks—old postcard social lines, if you will—with every post of a digital picture. Postcards are not yet completely extinct.
Libraries have always played an important role in my life. One of my happiest memories from childhood is the day that I received my very own library card. For the last two decades, I’ve had the good fortune to live in a historic small town that has an equally historic library. Established in 1760 as a subscription library, the Newtown Library Company is one on the earliest public librarues in the United States. It’s been in continuous operation for 261 years, with the exception of a few months during the Revolutionary War when British troops occupied the town. The current library building only dates from 1912, but it’s as quaint and welcoming a library as you will find anywhere in North America.
The infographic below offers a comprehensive look at the evolution of the library of the centuries.
First published in 1931, The Floating Admiral was a collaborative mystery novel with individual chapters written by the members of the Detection Club, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Clemence Dane, and husband-and-wife team GDH and M Cole. At its inception, the Detection Club operated as a secret society, with a mysterious initiation rite, a bible for writing mystery stories, and possibly a blood oath. Members of the Detection Club swore to uphold the group’s genre commandments, such as:
Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?
Needless to say, few of the authors followed the secret society’s rules. Agatha Christie in particular routinely broke them all. Others members of the Detection Club may have adhered to the group rules too strictly and failed to grow as writers.
As you might expect, the quality of the writing in The Floating Admiral varies from clever to laughable, but these literary tag-team gimmicks rarely turn out well. Each contributor to The Floating Admiral had to write a solution to the mystery, taking into account all the clues up until the end of their chapter. These solutions were sealed up in envelopes, and none could be revealed until everyone had finished. An appendix has all of the different authors’ solutions, providing some insight into their respective thought processes.
The Floating Admiral is set in one of those bucolic English villages that we all know so well from films and BBC TV shows. The actual solving of the murder of Admiral Penistone, whose corpse is discovered floating decorously in a rowing boat, is as messy as one might expect considering the structure of the project. However, the final chapter, entitled “Clearing up the Mess”, which was written by Anthony Berkeley (author, under the name Francis Iles, of the brilliant and enduring classic Malice Aforethought), provides a cleverly complicated solution.
There are dozens of old editions of the book available in hardcover and paperback, but if you’d like to read it for free here’s a pdf version.
Some publisher could make a killing by reviving these hidden poison cabinets in the shape of books that were popular in the 17th century.
The pitch-perfect SNL commercial (below) featuring Kate McKinnon & Billie Eilish advertises the ubiquitous, bland, budget hotel that can be found all across North America. I’ve stayed in way too many over the years.
Our rooms provide every comfort required by law: tiny soap in plastic, phone that blinks, Band-Aid-colored blanket, chair for suitcase, black & white photo of Ferris wheel, blow dryer that goes oooooooh, short glass wearing little hat, and small stain in place you have to touch.
And be sure to enjoy our hot tub; it’s always occupied by an eight-year-old boy in goggles staring at your breasts. He’s been in there for hours and he’s not getting out until you do.
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Travel Between The Pages 