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The Child and the Man illustrated by Frank Dadd
Flicking through bound issues of Victorian magazines is very much a part of my job description. This engraving from an 1877 edition of Cassell's Magazine caught my eye the other day, partly for the...
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Some 19th Century French Posters
A small and unassuming book in grey printed boards fell open on my desk today, XIXth Century French Posters by James Laver (Nicholas & Watson, London: 1944), and I wonder if, in 1944 when it was...
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A Long-Overdue Post of Vintage Swimwear
I haven't bought any new vintage swimwear photographs for a while, so I haven't been able to share any either. However, I have raided the folders on my hard drive and come up with this selection...
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Richard Roberts Glass
Richard Roberts is an artist and craftsman who began his sculpting by working in bronze with a heavy emphasis on modelling the natural world with some very sensitive work focused on the image of birds...
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Roundhouses in the 1930s
I have always had a soft spot for photographs of the great Art Deco American skyscrapers. So my eye was caught by this great photo of the Fisher Building in Detroit taken through the arches of the...
View ArticleAlbert Wainwright Extends at the Hepworth Gallery
I keep hearing good things about the Hepworth Gallery's current exhibition in Wakefield of work from their large collection by Albert Wainwright. And they must think it's been going well too because...
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Sarah Fanelli illustrates Butler, Rimbaud and Cocteau
I have already featured here, and on Twitter a number of items I bought from one of the best stationary shops ever - in the Snape Maltings near Aldeburgh in Suffolk. These are the last. Sara Fanelli...
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Lionel Birch
A few weeks ago I featured the rather lovely patterned paper on the outside of a book of poems by Lionel Birch called Between Sunset and Dawn, and one of the poems from the book as well. This above is...
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Marbled Paper at the British Library
Well, I made an informal New Year's resolution this year to get back to daily blogging again... it was also going so well until this year's first bad cold kicked in and, Byronesque, I have been...
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Simeon Solomon signs a book to Algernon Swinburne
Well, this isn't something you see everyday... items signed by Simeon Solomon are fairly scarce in the first instance but an association copy in which he presents a book to his friend and fellow...
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Jesus Christ Superstar: A Forgotten Photo in a Box
When sorting through old photos today I discovered this photo I had completely forgotten about. A school production of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar in which I was involved. It was so...
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St Hervé and the Wolf by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
These stunning images that appeared on Clive Hicks-Jenkins artlog this week are photographs of two articulated maquettes that Clive created as a precursor to a full scale painting of Herve and the...
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A picture of my Willy
No, Front Free Endpaper hasn't suddenly turned into a very different kind of blog. This handsome fella that I picked up today at a fair is identified on the verso in pen as 'Willy'. That's all there...
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Sketches: A Male Dancer
At the same fair today where I bought the chap below I also bought a 1940s sketch book. It contains quite a number of much more fully realised life-drawings but it was these two sketches of a dancer...
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Now We Are Pope. Frederick Rolfe in Venice
It has been a long time since Frederick Rolfe has been on the stage. Longer still since his life has inspired a dramatist to create a new piece. So if you are in London in March it will be well worth...
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The Grand Shop Windows of the 1950s
I have been reading a wonderful book recently: Show Windows. 75 Years of the Art of Display by Barry James Wood. There are some amazing images of shop window display from the 1930s through to the...
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Vintage Swimwear Madness
One of the places I fuel my habit in vintage swimwear photos is Ebay. It's an interesting market place where the normal rules about what something is worth don't seem to apply. Every six months or so...
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Things That Fall From Books #17: Poignant Poems
Miss M G Meugens wrote slightly sentimental poetry about the Great War and is published in magazines and newspapers of the time and remembered in a couple of anthologies. The fact that this isn't...
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Pierre's Pebbles
I would be surprised if anyone coming to this blog doesn't know the work of Pierre et Gilles, the French artist couple who create fabulous, spangled, airbrushed homoerotic photographs of mythic,...
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1940s Male Life Studies
You might remember that I was showing off a couple of sketches from a sketchbook I bought at the weekend. I mentioned then that there were some more fully worked drawings in the sketchbook as well as...
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