Confetti A few years ago, the bookshop Foyle’s moved next door to itself.

A little blog about confetti
open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Maundy Thursday is named for St Maundy, or Mandy, who was a waitress at the last supper (Luke 22:14). In the Middle Ages a popular ballad, ‘Raundy Maundy’, celebrated her fertility.

Postdoc klaxon! Spend a year in our lovely English dept at UCL. English lang or lit, PhD awarded post Oct 23. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Job klaxon! Come and be an Early Modernist at UCL: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Someone was trying to take a portrait of their two fave Chickens, and this happened.

“A shoe-dryer?!”

I’m mostly looking forward to dong mountaineering book!

'The Bill Poster' (1899) Charles Goodwin Norton on Marchmont Street

I wrote a little essay about the early English filmmaker Charles Goodwin Norton substack.com/home/post/p-...

Latest catalogue from @blackwells.bsky.social is books by – or owned by – Naomi Michison. One for you @jennykenyon.bsky.social? blackwells.co.uk/rarebooks/ca...

Would you be interested? Spotted by a friend in London

The Lovejoy reboot you didn’t realise you needed

Someone’s left a stuffed ferret outside the library on my road. Yours for the taking if you can get to Muswell Hill fast enough.

The pict tribes, under Chief Calhoo,
To scare their foes were painted blue.
But when their foes were very few
They only blue their nose.

Haha! I imagine them walking around like Flat Stanley from spraying their clothes with eighteen boxes of starch before ironing!

Oh, it's starch.

Good question. The robin, like the lobster, appears on almost every page. Whatever it is, they're eating a LOT of it!

Charity shop find: early C20 scrap book. Somebody likes lobsters. @drbibliomane.bsky.social

It's this one. Nice blurb from Stanley Tucci too - keeping it classy!

Emily Dickinson of course! And those are New England smallops. Yum!

That one is majestic isn't it. The alliteration, moving into to those single syllable lines, and then - bam! - she hits you with "Porridge"!

For a while this morning I was misreading the first line as "Chickleg". Disappointed when I realised it was just "Chicken". A spondee would've been bold.

My friend just bought me this book of found shopping lists and I can't stop imagining they're Emily Dickinson poems. “Chicken — Brockley — — Milk”. I think it’s about death.

Ooh nice! (Imagines a viol made out of crystal with a luminescing glow-worm inside.)

Lovely! Thanks Nicola.

At the Natural History Museum looking at mayflies trapped in amber. Biomatter that gets frozen in amber like this is called an "inclusion". Isn't that a wonderful word to conjure with.

Unhelpfully, this is what the weather forecast used to look like in the Times. I only wanted to say whether it was sunny or not in London. Can anyone translate?

Yep. MotF works really well for material text stuff. Good readers vs bad readers; clean books vs tatty books; books that speak… Leah Price has a chapter on it in “How to Do Things with Books”, and I’m happy to share my lecture slides/lesson plan too if you like.

Oh wow! The SoI needs a hawk, definitely. Something to bring up at the next meeting.

This is Winnie the Harris hawk. She comes to the British Library twice a week to scare away the pigeons.

Pius’s “bulla contra turchos” (Fust & Schoeffer, 1463) a contender.