Be really cool, man, archive

The recent announcement from the British Postal Museum and Archive announcing that they have upgraded their online catalogue may not have been the most retweeted 140 characters in the history of Twitter.  But the news is actually quite exciting. On an entirely practical level the images are now larger than a postage stamp. The particular joy of this is that I can […]

New ideas for dishwashers

Christmas is madness in so many ways, but one of them is that there is far too much television on to take in all at once.  So one of the series that Mr Crownfolio and I stashed away to watch later, was The Home That 2 Built, which is a history of makeover and suchlike programming on […]

out of the attic

Apologies for the break, I’ve been away and went in such a rush that I didn’t even have time to put the ‘out of office’ notice up here.  There will be proper posting later this week, but I’ve just popped in briefly to point at this. It’s a Barbara Jones mural from 1961, entitled Sociology […]

pictorially speaking

Anonymous chemist’s poster, c. 1880 John Hassall, c. 1889. John Hassall, 1908. Maxwell Armfield, 1915. Saville Lumley, 1914 Alfred Leete, 1914. Anonymous, 1915 Anonymous, 1915 Tom Purvis, 1923. Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1927 Clive Gardiner, c.1930 Anonymous, 1927-1933 A. R Thomson, 1931. Vanessa Bell, 1934  Denis Constanduros,  1932 Gilroy, 1934 Richard Beck, 1937 Dame Laura Knight, […]

psst, over here…

Early days Anonymous chemist’s poster, c. 1880 The origins of the poster are confused (some understatement here) and obviously depend how you define a poster in the first place.  Generally, posters are believed to emerge just before the turn of the century, although this does rather beg the question as to why British cities were […]

Exposition

It’s a rare thing, the intersection between Quad Royal and literary fiction, but by Jove I think we have found it.  Or perhaps I should say, by Barbara Jones! The work in question is Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe. Now this – if you have my mindset at least – was always going to be […]