This collection of rare and vintage postcards offers a unique look at a vanished China and its storied capital. Comprising 355 black-and-white and hand-tinted Beijing photography postcards that span the period from the last years of Imperial China to the Japanese invasion of 1937, it is a treasure trove for buffs of Beijing history, collectors, Sinophiles, and anyone fascinated by people and cultures from times past. Readers will enjoy the wide selection of images showing different aspects of the life of old Peking from the arrival of a camel train at a city gate to hand-coloured views of the Forbidden City and an array of vendors, street performers, officials, gentry, commoners, and foreign tourists. Several chapters present the city's distinctive Beijing architecture its walls and gates, towers, fountains, temples, pagodas, memorial arches, and public or imperial buildings, including the Summer and Winter Palaces and the Ming Tombs. Other chapters of Chinese photography look at the Manchu rulers, street life, the Legation Quarter and Western presence, and the Great Wall. Included are some rare scenes depicting the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion and 1911 revolution Manchu fashion, colourful means of transportation, and the coming of the railroad. Of particular note are images of the Empress Dowager, the child emperor Puyi, and other personalities at the Manchu Court. The book also includes eight colour postcards of paintings by the famous artist Carl Wuttke and rare cards showing etched drawings of the Old Summer Palace now only a field of ruins. The author, who was born and lived in China before 1949, has written an informative introduction to each chapter as well as a general introduction to classical Beijing. A foreword by historian and Beijing expert Susan Naquin situates this collection at once as a precious record of old Peking and a revealing snapshot of Western views of China in the first golden age of tourism. Old Beijing: Postcards from the Imperial City offers a visual time capsule of both Beijing's history and traditional Chinese culture in a unique and revealing postcard format.

Forever cherish your favorite Christmas traditions and celebrations with this heirloom-quality memory album! With an elegant linen cover, archival-quality paper, and hand-drawn illustrations, Our Christmas Story: A Modern Christmas Memory Book will be a family treasure for years and generations to come. Cherish your Favorite Memories: Write down meaningful traditions Remember holiday celebrations you hosted or attended Record special gifts given or received Save photos with Santa or annual family Christmas cards Preserve treasured family recipes And so much more! Heirloom Quality: Chic, timeless design Elegant linen cover Acid-free and archival paper Generous 9.75" x 9.75" trim size offers ample space for photos and cards Lay-flat design allows you to easily write in the book A pocket to safely store letters to Santa and other Christmas keepsakes Lovingly designed artwork and thoughtful prompts encourage you to reflect and celebrate PS: It's the perfect holiday gift!

Learn when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em with Card Night, a collection of 52 classic card games, including rules and strategies. Featuring step-by-step, illustrated instructions, and two indexes that organize each game by difficulty and number of players needed, Card Night includes directions for playing all the most popular card games, including Hearts and Bridge, Rummy and Go Fish. In addition to providing the rules of standard game play, Card Night also details the fascinating stories and peculiarities behind some of the world's most famous card decks, some of which were used as currency, tools for propaganda, and even as a means for sending coded messages. Offering one game for each week of the year, Card Night is the go-to companion for weekly game nights, long car rides, and rainy days spent at home. Wow your friends and family with your game playing prowess and keep them entertained with fascinating details from playing card history.

This fascinating and bizarre collection compiles the most unusual, obscure books from the far reaches of the human imagination throughout history. From the author of the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Phantom Atlas and The Sky Atlas comes a unique and beautifully illustrated journey through the history of literature. The Madman's Library delves into its darkest territories to hunt down the oddest books and manuscripts ever written, uncovering the intriguing stories behind their creation. From the Qur'an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein, to the gorgeously decorated fifteenth-century lawsuit filed by the Devil against Jesus, to the most enormous book ever created, The Madman's Library features many long forgotten, eccentric, and extraordinary volumes gathered from around the world. Books written in blood and books that kill, books of the insane and books that hoaxed the globe, books invisible to the naked eye and books so long they could destroy the Universe, books worn into battle and books of code and cypher whose secrets remain undiscovered. Spell books, alchemist scrolls, wearable books, edible books, books to summon demons, books written by ghosts, and more all come together in the most curiously strange library imaginable. Featuring hundreds of remarkable images and packed with entertaining facts and stories to discover, The Madman's Library is a captivating compendium perfect for bibliophiles, literature enthusiasts, and collectors intrigued by bizarre oddities, obscure history, and the macabre. - MUST-HAVE FOR BOOKLOVERS: Anyone who appreciates a good read will love delving into this weird world of books and adding this collection to their own bookshelf. - DISCOVER SOMETHING TRULY UNIQUE: The Madman's Library will let you in on the secret and obscure histories of the strangest books ever made. - EXPERT AUTHOR: Edward Brooke-Hitching is the son of an antiquarian book dealer, a lifelong rare book collector, and a master of taking visual deep dives into unusual historical subjects, such as the maps of imaginary geography in The Phantom Atlas or ancient pathways through the stars in The Sky Atlas.

This title includes a book & a slipcase. "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark", or more simply "Hamlet", is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father, the King, and then taken the throne and married Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. The play vividly charts the course of real and feigned madness - from overwhelming grief to seething rage - and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts provides an introduction to the language and concepts employed in bibliographical studies and textual scholarship as they pertain to early modern manuscripts and printed texts Winner, Honourable Mention for Literature, Language and Linguistics, American Publishers Prose Awards, 2010 Based almost exclusively on new primary research Explains the complex process of viewing documents as artefacts, showing readers how to describe documents properly and how to read their physical properties Demonstrates how to use the information gleaned as a tool for studying the transmission of literary documents Makes clear why such matters are important and the purposes to which such information is put Features illustrations that are carefully chosen for their unfamiliarity in order to keep the discussion fresh

With meticulous care, Judith G. Raymo presents an impressive array of Sylvia Plath's published and personal writings. As Raymo notes in her insightful introduction, Plath's journals, when read in tandem with her correspondence to her mother, friends, and family "provide us with an abundant record of a writer's interior and private life and its many turning points." Expanding on an exhibition held at the Grolier Club, this catalogue includes an essay by Plath's award-winning biographer Heather Clark.

This catalogue discusses and illustrates a wide variety of Chinese books, dating from the sixth to the nineteenth century - some very rare.

A checklist of the Horblit collection of books, tracts, leaflets, and broadsides printed by Sir Thomas Phillipps at his press at Middle Hill, or elsewhere to his order, now in the collection of the Grolier Club. Published to accompany The Collector Collected: The Horblit Archive of Sir Thomas Phillipps at the Grolier Club, held at the Club May 20 - July 31, 1997. Designed by Jerry Kelly, and printed at the Stinehour Press in an edition of 550 copies.

An illustrated history of football trade cards, an epic saga of 1,000 brands and myriad collections. The A-Z traces the earliest cards and stickers - British inventions, both - through a century of sports cards from tobacco cards to Panini stickers, via everything that came in between: footballers issued with chewing gum and sweet cigarettes, lucky bag mementoes, football teams cut from packets of tea, and many more. It chronicles the epoch of our forefathers and the very first football cards, dating back to the 1880s, followed by the era of their children and the earliest stickers - and so the rise of cigarette cards and paper soccer star adhesives. These days, along with our Panini stickers and trading cards, we appreciate these vintage treasures not only for their beauty but also for their value. Fond recollections of childhood passions past and present will warm hearts, while enchanting galleries of rarely seen cards will captivate football fans and collectors alike. Incorporating a guide to values, the A-Z is priceless.

What does it mean to digitize a medieval manuscript? This book examines this question by exploring a range of advanced imaging technologies, from multispectral to 3D to reflectance transformation imaging. To understand imaging technologies requires an understanding of the complex materiality of what is being digitized and, to this end, the book focuses on the relationship between digital technologies and the complex materiality of manuscripts and the human bodies that engages them. From this perspective, the chapters explore imaging technologies, interfaces to present digital surrogates, and limitations to and enhancements through the digital. But lest past photographic information be lost, the book also examines historical photographs, exploring their rich visual information, and how digitizing and comparing them transforms what can be known. Examples and innovations from the author's work digitizing the eighth-century St. Chad Gospels at Lichfield Cathedral are provided. This book is essential reading for all those involved in large and small scale manuscript digitization projects in both scholarly and cultural heritage contexts.

A sequel to Tomita's A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England 1558-1603, this volume provides the data for the succeeding 40 years (during the reign of King James I and Charles I) and contributes to the study of Anglo-Italian relations in literature through entries on 187 Italian books (335 editions) printed in England. The Catalogue starts with the books published immediately after the death of Queen Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603, and ends in 1642 with the closing of English theatres. It also contains 45 Elizabethan books (75 editions), which did not feature in the previous volume. Formatted along the lines of Mary Augusta Scott's Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (1916), and adopting Philip Gaskell's scientific method of bibliographical description, this volume provides reliable and comprehensive information about books and their publication, viewed in a general perspective of Anglo-Italian transactions in Jacobean and part of Caroline England.

The turn of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily difficult period for African Americans, a time of unchecked lynchings, mob attacks, and rampant Jim Crow segregation. During these bleak years, Emma Crawford, a young African American woman living in Pennsylvania, corresponded by postcard with friends and family members and collected the cards she received from all over the country. Her album-spanning from 1906 to 1910 and analyzed in Emma's Postcard Album-becomes an entry point into a deeply textured understanding of the nuances and complexities of African American lives and the survival strategies that enabled people "to make a way from no way." As snippets of lived experience, eye-catching visual images, and reflections of historical moments, the cards in the collection become sources for understanding not only African American life, but also broader American history and culture. In Emma's Postcard Album, Faith Mitchell innovatively places the contents of this postcard collection into specific historic and biographical contexts and provides a new interpretation of postcards as life writings, a much-neglected aspect of scholarship. Through these techniques, a riveting world we know far too little about is revealed, and we gain new insights into the perspectives and experience of African Americans-in their own words. Capping off these contributions, the text is a visual feast, illustrated with arresting images from the Golden Age of postcards as well as newspaper clippings and other archival material.

Literary archives differ from most other types of archival papers in that their locations are more diverse and difficult to predict. Acquiring institutions for literary papers have historically had very little by way of collecting policies and consequently the collecting of literary papers has often been opportunistic and serendipitous. The essays collected in this book all derive or continue from the recent work of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network, which takes a comparative, transnational and internationalist approach to studying literary manuscripts, their uses and their significance. The focus on diaspora provides a philosophical framework which gives a highly original set of points of reference for the study of literary archives, including concepts such as the natural home, the appropriate location, exile, dissidence, fugitive existence, cultural hegemony, patrimony, heritage, and economic migration.

Bourgeois scholarship as disguise: “Fake books” are objects that simulate the most important carriers of knowledge and culture by subverting fundamental functions such as visualization, information or entertainment. Most of these “book simulators” are beautiful containers, which serve for storing – or hiding – approximately everything. The viewer is always confronted by the discrepancy between appearance and being, between form and function.

Armin Müller has collected book dummies of very different sizes, styles and provenances from different eras: art-historically valuable, technically sophisticated and historically exciting pieces, but also kitsch of all kinds. The imaginative and creative richness of camou-flage and illusion seems to be inexhaustible.

This catalogue describes 24 manuscripts from the collection of Thomas Ryburn Buchanan presented to the Bodleian Library in 1939 and 1941, including illuminated manuscripts from before the mid-sixteenth century. The collection consists primarily of late medieval devotional books from France, the Netherlands and renaissance Italy. It includes "Books of Hours", half of which are French and date from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, a Bridgettine Breviary, a Milanese Breviary, a ferial Psalter, a Psalter of c 1300 and three Italian humanistic texts. A notable feature of the collection is the number of manuscripts with early and fine bindings. The illustrated catalogue gives detailed descriptions of the manuscripts - their texts, illumination, and codicological characteristics (including bindings).

Enjoy a nostalgic look back at Allentown, Pennsylvania, during its "Golden Age," from the late 1890s through the 1950s. During this period, Allentown's citizens left behind their frugal Pennsylvania German traditions to take on the social and cultural trappings of the twentieth century. Capitalizing on a labor force swelled by an influx of immigrants, local entrepreneurs created many new businesses and factories. As their fortunes and aspirations grew, these men built large mansions, hotels, and public parks. Amusement parks sprang up, theaters were built on Hamilton Street, and Allentown became an All-American city with an upscale future. Over 360 images of vintage postcards and memorabilia bring this exciting time in Allentown's history to life.