Historical Highlights #028

Posted on by M.E. Bond Posted in Historical HighlightsTagged , , , , , ,

Here’s a collection of links for your Friday reading: historical highlights about music, alchemy, art, and even fandoms.

Jazz fan? Over 1,000 hours of early jazz recordings are available online.

Bob Dylan fan? Read this NYT article about his secret archive (lots of images, too).

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Bob Dylan working in a room above the Cafe Espresso in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1964, left. On the right are items from his archive. Credit Douglas R. Gilbert, left; via the Bob Dylan Archive, right.

Listen to a 30-minute documentary about Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) from BBC Radio 4.

The British Library has an 18th century copy of a 13th century book called the Book of the Seven Climes, “the earliest known study focused wholly on alchemical illustrations.” Intrigued? Read more on the British Library blog.

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Matching illustrations in the 13th-century Book of Images (left) and the 18th-century copy of al-‘Irāqī’s Book of the Seven Climes (right). The later image is much reduced and reinterpreted, and pseudo-hieroglyphs were added. (left: İstanbul Arkeoloji Muzeleri Kütüphanesi, MS 1574, fol. 196r; right: British Library, Add. MS 25724, fol. 18r)

How’s this for a headline? “An Early Copy of the Magna Carta Was Found Forgotten in an Old Scrapbook”

Ballerina Misty Copeland recreates some of Degas’ famous paintings for an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Read the story here.

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Ken Browar & Deborah Ory

And, finally, for serious members of fandoms: “Avoiding Kamino’s Fate: Archives, Archivists, and the Preservation of Works of Fandom”

I hope you found some stimulating reading. Have a lovely weekend.

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