The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, February 1864. A young woman steps up to the Post Office counter and asks “Anything for me, if you please?”
The Brooklyn Fair To Aid Union Soldiers During the U.S. Civil War
Van Gogh’s Olive Tree Paintings
One of my blogging hobbies (“blobbies”?) is using CC Search from Creative Commons and the Flickr Commons to look up images connected to my blogging. This time the search term was olives. Olives were on my mind after visits to an olive grove and olive oil processing facility. Not surprisingly, the search tools led me […]
Fish in Japanese Art: Hiroshige’s Woodblock Prints
One of my favorite genres of art is the 19th century Japanese landscape print, especially the works by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), who is best known as the creator of several series that showed famous scenes from Japan, like “53 Stations of the Tokaido” and “Famous Views of the 60-Odd Provinces.” The subjects of the prints […]
Bring Zing to Your Posts with Public Domain or Creative Commons Images
Soon after I started blogging 10+ years ago, I learned about Creative Commons licenses, which some creators apply to their own work so it can be shared with certain restrictions (note that this blog is currently licensed with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5, and my Flickr collection also has a CC license). After figuring out the mechanics, I started using CC-licensed […]
Sacramento Murals: A City’s Stunning Surfaces (Gallery)
(Disclosure: I received a discount on the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC) registration fee in exchange for writing three posts about my experiences at the conference.) It was a long hot drive to Sacramento for the International Food Blogger Conference (IFBC) — a searing 95 F and increasing traffic intensity as I reached the city’s outskirts. Construction and […]
Decorative Letters In 1880s-Era Good Housekeeping Magazine
Before magazine designers and editors could use lots of photos to enliven their pages, they needed other methods. In the late 19th Century, Good Housekeeping used decorative initials at the start of each article. Unlike typical initials, these weren’t simply larger or more ornate, but were creative depictions of letters that related to the magazine’s themes, […]
Ornate Celery Vases Brought Style to an Unexciting Vegetable
When I typed “celery” into the CC Search box to search a few museums’ public domain collections to illustrate my previous post on celery on restaurant menus, I was expecting one or two results, perhaps a still life. And so I was surprised when the search returned a bunch of objects called “celery vases” from […]
Another Batch of Vintage Book Covers
While browsing the amazing and often confounding Flickr Commons, I was entranced by a collection of late 19th century book covers from the British Library. The majority of the nearly 900 covers are “pulp novels,” but you’ll also find travel books, text books, and other miscellany. Last month I shared a batch of six vintage book covers, and this […]
More Sketches by W.M. Thackeray
Thackerayana has too many enchanting sketches to be limited to a single post of Thackeray sketches, so I’m highlighting ten more sketches (this time as a “slider,” instead of a tiled gallery). In the gallery you’ll find struggles with umbrellas, fencing vegetables, dancers, and more. I want to highlight one of the sketches, which I call “big […]
Vintage Book Covers from the British Library
On my journeys through the amazing Flickr Commons, one of the more exciting finds is a collection of late 19th century book covers from the British Library. The nearly 900 covers are primarily what we today call “pulp novels” written for the mass market, but there are also travel books, text books, and other miscellany. In the image […]