Thursday, June 27, 2013

Altered (Tourist) Postcard






...from Greece, a few years ago.  Tomorrow: tiny plane from Chios to Rhodes.  Not exactly how the Knights Templar came in.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Plank Board and Bear



....and a delicious mustard-yellow phone.

Monday, June 10, 2013

A Sad One from 1914

A so-called 'Bertillon' mugshot---pre-fingerprint technology.  Bertillon  was a French detective who devised a system for taking cranial measurements etc to establish identity.

Don't have the card in front of me so I can't check the name of the woman here (usually with Bertillon cards it's on the back--along with crime one has been accused of).  Her occupation listed as 'waitress' but something in her look tells me it's a case of 'Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.'

Almost too much disparate information to process here.  The slightly collapsed look of mouth/chin: a reminder of how awful people's teeth still were, even at the beginning of the 20th c.

And, yes: an American mugshot--from either California or Oregon as I recall--but still one can't help gawping at the date: August 14, 1914.  World War One had just begun in Belgium and the north of France and was starting in on its third surprisingly bloody and horrible week.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Plumero Electrostática



Obviously not a postcard--more a sort of ecstatic electrostatic plumerillo kind of thing.  But memorable nonetheless.

What they start calling you at Stanford University when you've gone beyond being a "fuzzy."   Not "fuzzy-emeritus," but "fluffy."

Saturday, June 1, 2013

A New Girl Every Year



Two lovely Blackie's Girls' Annual covers from the 1930s.   I when I lived in England as a kid my grandparents frequently gave me an 'annual' for Christmas---tho' none from this series, which I believe may have been discontinued by the 1960s.   Had several Rupert books and a fascinating 1961 (?) 1962 (?) volume called Mainly For Children--with articles on all kinds of odd things.