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Hack & Inky: Fleet Street (City of London)
William Caxton was the first person to publish a book in English. He realised the intellectual and commercial potentials of the new printing technology while working as a merchant in the Low Countries...
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The Shibboleth Test : Thames Street (City of London)
A shibboleth is a linguistic identity marker. It is a phrase (or custom) that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. Its functions as a password and excludes those that do...
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Gustave Flaubert & Bibliomania
Black pencil sketch of Gustave Flaubert by his brother Achille, around 1829. Gustave Flaubert began to test his ability as a writer during his school years. On February 12, 1837, he published a...
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THE BOOK BLOGGER
In Praise of Print on Paper: Authors, Publishers, Private Presses, Booksellers, Typographers, Bibliophiles, Bibliomaniacs, Librarians & Auctioneers Much has been made in recent years about the...
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Refugees & Migrants: St Paul’s Cross (City of London)
The designations ‘alien’ and ‘stranger’ were used in the early modern period to refer to foreign-born individuals residing in the realm, but with none of the franchises of native Englishmen. The term...
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European Londoners
After a long silence we are going to revive our blog – recently we published this great book, by Jaap Harskamp: European Londoners. We will publish it on line, in installments. But you can get the...
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SCHWITTERS AND JARRY AT THE GABERBOCCHUS PRESS | Randolph Avenue (Maida Vale)
Franciszka Weinles was born on 28 June 1907 in Warsaw, the daughter of the Jewish artist Jakub Weinles. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw in 1931. Stefan Themerson was born on 25...
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Porn and Pansies – Red Lion Street (London)
During the later nineteenth century middle class society was obsessed with righteousness and ill at ease with modernist art. Whilst the writer depicted the bourgeois as a malicious fool (le père Ubu...
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Beyond the religious divide: Rubens and Mayerne in London St Martin’s Lane...
By Jaap Harskamp / you can find more articles by his hand here Peter Paul Rubens was a painter with a Baroque brush. He was admired by his contemporaries as the creator of dramatically charged and...
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Lay Down Your Weary Tune : Palace of Westminster (Westminster)
The Renaissance held music in high regard. It played a prominent part in religious, court and civic life. The interchange of ideas in Europe through ever closer economic and political contact brought...
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FAKE NEWS FROM FORMOSA: Ironmonger Row (Islington)
When in 1737 Samuel Johnson left Lichfield for London to start his career as a writer, he faced years of financial hardship before finally achieving fame in the early 1750s. One of many competing...
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Holbein at the Steelyard: Cannon Street (City of London)
During the high and late Middle Ages the majority of strangers in London were individual members of a multi-national merchant class. In 1303, Edward I had signed the Carta Mercatoria (Charter of the...
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A Fickle Friend: Lime Street (City of London)
The so-called album amicorum is a book of ‘autographs’ collected by wandering scholars as they roamed between universities. The craze started in the middle of the sixteenth century. A typical album...
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PISSING IN THE WIND: Great Queen Street (Covent Garden)
The Atlantic slave trade began in the mid-1400s and lasted into the nineteenth century. By the 1600s the Dutch contested the English and French for control of the trade, but England emerged as the...
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Painter, Poet, Pimp | Bow Street (Covent Garden)
The death of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of Charles II marked the end of a period of state control and repression. The overthrow of the Interregnum unleashed an explosion of energy. London...
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Dr Marten’s Poxy Book (Hatton Garden (Camden)
In June 1660, Charles II left the Low Countries, departing from Scheveningen beach. Many Royalists who had been exiled for over a decade made their way back to London, together with the various...
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Canaries and Other Migrants
Birds represent crucial aspects of Christian teaching. The dove signifies the Holy Spirit as well as marking peace and purity; the eagle, like the phoenix, is a symbol of the Resurrection; the pelican...
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Fag End Patriotism – Commercial Road (Whitechapel)
Linguist Luis de Torres accompanied Columbus on his first voyage to America as an interpreter. A Jew at the time of the Inquisition, he was forced to convert to Catholicism before setting sail in...
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Losing One’s Head: Prince’s Square (Wapping)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydriotaphia,_Urn_Burial In 1658, physician and author Thomas Browne published his reflections on death and burial in Hydriotaphia: Urne-Buriall which made him a pioneer...
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Vampires and Other Foreigners
In September 2009 workers in a mass grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo dug up a female skeleton with a brick lodged between her jaws. The person had died during the plague epidemic of...
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