Bookmark purge

One of an occasional purge of bookmarks that I've found very interesting, but not sufficient to build a blog post around.

• Red Letter Days of my life (1892, volume 1 / volume 2), the memoirs of Cornelia Crosse, wife of Andrew Crosse, 'Wizard of the Quantocks'; see also Memorials, Scientific and Literary, of Andrew Crosse, the Electrician (1857).
• Frances Mary Minns, Victorian Artist, Born on the Isle of Wight ("Frances 'Fanny' Minns trained in Gernany as a painter. Book illustrations, postcards, watercolours, oils and still life won her awards, but who was she?"). One of a number of historical articles, many with Isle of Wight interest, by Jan Toms.
• Humorous and other poetic pictures, legends and stories of Devon (Frederick Thomas, c. 1883). Occasionally interesting historical/geographical travelogue in ponderous verse.
• Mandelbox trip: Krzysztof Marczak's beautiful animation of the Mandelbox fractal: like a fly-through of a beautiful mechanism of crumbling brass filigree. One of the many pleasant science/aesthetic posts at Ephemeral Curios.
• Dead Reckonings: Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences. Ron Doerfler's journal that "attempts to capture my occasional encounters with the technically elegant but nearly forgotten in the mathematical sciences—artistically creative works that strike me as particularly brilliant".
• Parodies of the works of English & American authors (Walter Hamilton, 1884-, volume 1 / volume 2 / volume 3 / volume 4 / volume 5, volume 6). Monumental collection, for anyone interested in literary parody.
• Hindenburg's march into London, being a translation from the German original (trans. Louis G Redmond-Howard, 1916). A translation of Paul Georg Münch's WW1 polemical/propaganda story.
• The vulgarities of speech corrected: with elegant expressions for provincial and vulgar English, Scots, and Irish; for the use of those who are unacquainted with grammar (Anon, 1829). One of many 19th century "me-too" prescriptivist grammar guides - but the social subtext of anxieties about grammar that led to prescriptivism is blatant in this one.
• Upper limb disorders in musicians. Oo-er. And Assessing the Instrumentalist Interface: Modifications, Ergonomics and Maintenance of Play is scary too.
• Poetical letters tu es brither Jana, and A witch story, tha old humman way tha urd cloke, ur tha evil eye, in the Devonshire dialect, by Nathan Hogg [pseud.] - follow link to full view. Hathi Trust page for Henry Baird's 1865 book. See also New series of poems in the Devonshire dialect (1866) and Letters & Poems Tu Es Brither Jan, in the Devonshire Dialect (1902).
• Poetry Blindness: Alexithymia and Metaphor. Interesting, but I'm not sure what to make of it. Its general thrust is that you have some cognitive disorder if (for instance) you don't see metaphorical meaning in Walt Whitman's line "Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries"..
• The Comic Blackstone (1876); wonderful satirical parody on William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England.
• No Robots - "A student film, from San Jose State University, which is directed by Kimberly Knoll (USA) and 張永翰 Yunghan Chang (Taiwan)".
• The Dennis Wheatley Project: "I am endeavouring to read every novel Dennis Wheatley ever wrote, in the order in which he wrote them".
• Paved with gold; or, the romance and reality of the London streets (1858) - a more upbeat take on Victorian London by Augustus Mayhew, brother of the better-known Henry Mayhew.
• A glossary; or, Collection of words, phrases, names, and allusions to customs, proverbs, etc., which have been thought to require illustration in the works of English authors, particularly Shakespeare and his contemporaries. A new ed., with considerable additions both of words and examples (1888) - reprint of Robert Nares' 1822 dictionary of Elizabethan terms.

- Ray