It’s the end of July again and, as I do every year at this time, I travel out to the town of Great Barrington, in the Berkshires, to do a book and paper show at a venue known as Searles Castle. It’s a picturesque structure, with mirrors, chandeliers, paneled walls, and scary old trolls and […] More >>
Archives for July 2012
Nantucket Memories or, Where Did They All Go?
Pinkham’s Nantucket, 1791 (hand colored reproduction, $300) In the 1990s I used to exhibit at the Nantucket Historical Association’s August Antiques Show. It was held during the height of Nantucket’s social season and it attracted the usual crowd – long on money and short on any imagination of themselves beyond what the Style of the […] More >>
Extreme Book Selling
Got some good news last week about my old friend and colleague Bob Langmuir. As you may recall Bob, a talented but troubled book and ephemera dealer, was the subject of my 2008 book, Hubert’s Freaks The book dealt with Bob’s discovery of an incredible archive of papers kept by the African American manager of […] More >>
The Little Giant
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, “the Little Giant,” embodied traits that propelled Victorian England to dominance at the height of the Industrial Revolution. This polymath genius had a knack for devising innovative solutions to stubborn engineering problems, and a boldness of vision that led him to attempt some of the great projects of his age. He must […] More >>
The Feldman Archive
Up in Nova Scotia, clearing my field down by the river and living in the studio my artist friend and I built back in 1975. I wrote about this place last year. Over the decades he and his two wives and three children used it as a storage depot while they decamped to various parts […] More >>