On my way to Bendigo I stopped to go to the loo in Murchison, outside of Shepparton, and there it was
Yesterday, for purely professional reasons I ended up researching Victorian tin hat boxes.
Something, I think we can all agree is more than a little esoteric, but which tells us something about the social history of the times.
On a whim, I asked Microsoft CoPilot, their AI tool, to write me a professional article on Victorian tin hat boxes.
I won't reproduce the whole article - if you want to see the whole thing, the link's at the bottom this post, but here's the first half to get a flavour of the content
CoPilot>> Certainly! Victorian tin hat boxes are fascinating relics that evoke a sense of nostalgia and elegance. Let’s delve into their history and significance.
The Allure of Victorian Tin Hat Boxes
Victorian-era hat boxes were more than mere containers; they were symbols of status, fashion, and practicality. Here are some key points about these charming accessories:
Purpose and Design:
Victorian tin hat boxes served a dual purpose: protecting delicate hats during travel and showcasing the owner’s refined taste.
They were typically made of sturdy metal, often tin, to withstand the rigors of transportation.
Elaborate designs adorned the exteriors, featuring intricate patterns, embossing, and sometimes hand-painted details.
Fashionable Travel Companions:
In an era when hats were essential fashion accessories, owning a stylish hat box was a mark of sophistication.
Ladies’ bonnets, wide-brimmed hats, and feathered fascinators all found their cozy spot within these boxes.
Materials and Construction:
Tin was a popular material due to its durability and lightweight nature.
Some hat boxes featured leather trimmings or fabric lining on the interior.
Sturdy handles allowed for easy carrying.
Decorative Elements:
Victorian hat boxes often showcased floral motifs, geometric patterns, or scenic landscapes.
Embossed metalwork added texture and depth.
Some boxes even had locks and keys for added security.
[text cut]
Conclusion
Victorian tin hat boxes encapsulate an era when elegance met practicality. Whether you’re a collector, decorator, or simply curious about the past, these charming relics continue to captivate us with their timeless appeal. 🎩✨
I wouldn't have said that the presence of emoticons added to the professionalism of the piece, but most of it reads like a glossy magazine puff article, which isn't surprising as the sources listed that were used to create the article were eBay, Etsy and a UK interior design website.
It didn't use any of the more professional antique auction sites or any of the blog articles from these sites on materials, construction dating etc. Basically it parroted content from some of the more popular sites, which is kind of what we would expect given the high hit rate on Etsy and eBay.
I was a little disappointed that the results were so poor, I'd have thought that they might have been able to use some reputation weighting to drag in more professional content, rather then simply regurgitating some fairly vacuous content.
I don't see myself being replaced by a bot anytime soon, which is probably a good thing.
If you want to see the whole article it's online at https://sl.bing.net/hfnQ8XniUyi
For years I used to use an HP Chromebook to read my mail in bed on winter mornings.
As a device it lasted well, even once it was out of updates, and I only stopped using it when the battery died part way through the pandemic.
By then I had my android tablet and a couple of windows laptops so I didn't replace it. I did buy myself a chromebook - a Lenovo Ideapad duet a year or so later when I needed a really lightweight device to take on our Kimberley trip in 2022 - essentially I needed a device with a keyboard I could use with spreadsheets at the start and end of the trip - as we were going to be out of internet range apart from some very slow satellite internet - no Starlink then - it didn't seem worth taking a laptop.
Taking the Chromebook, especially as the duet can function as a tablet when the keyboard is folded back, proved an excellent solution, but I must admit I havn't made as much use of it as perhaps I should, preferring to take a windows based laptop when travelling.
Well, all that changed a few weeks ago when we broke down on our way to Melbourne. On a whim, because after all we were only going overnight I'd taken the Chromebook instead of a full size laptop as probably all we would need to do is find somewhere for dinner that evening, and of course check my email the next morning.
Well, things didn't work out quite as planned. And this is where the Chromebook came into its own, letting me search for transmission specialists, pull up breakdown insurance documents, write emails, book train tickets home, all things that could have been done on an ipad, but with a little more difficulty due to not having a keyboard, and which obviously could have equally been done on a laptop.
But the Chromebook, which is often perceived as less capable device due to its association with its use in schools, let me do all this with relative ease.
I came out of the experience impressed by the Chromebook's ability to act like a super tablet, and with its ability to run android applications as well as quite meaty applications like Libre office in a linux container.
And with the ability to run android applications I could access our Evernote archive where we keep all the electronic copies of all the car and insurance documents given everything comes as a pdf these days.
So, quietly impressed.
One of the major objections to Chromebooks used to be their dependence on the internet, but then we're all dependent on the internet these days.
More importantly I was able to do all I wanted to do over a 4G Telstra connection - increasingly these days its the quality of the network connection that is the limiting factor, no matter what device one is using.
Certainly, with the distraction free machine I find that while it will let me work quite happily without an internet connection, when there's a connection available, it's amazing how much I use it, even if only check information.
When we went to Tasmania earlier this year, I took a full capability laptop, and I still would on an extended trip, if only because the Ideapad Duet lacks an SD card slot for easy backup of camera cards, but for an overnight trip the Chromebook is more than capable, especially given its excellent battery life ...
Last week at the Athenaeum, I catalogued some t-shirts.
That of course was only part of the exercise, I needed to accession them, basically generate a unique catalogue number, record the catalogue number, and then attach the catalogue number to the artefact.
The baseball caps were easy - basically an acid free luggage tag looped around the strap with the accession number written on it.
The stubby holder and the t-shirts were more difficult as they lacked anchor points for the luggage tag.
So what to do?
Well I didn't know what was best practice, and unfortunately no one else did. But YouTube came to my aid, with a couple of short videos, one from New Zealand, the other from the UK.
It's all really simple - cut a length of acid free cotton tape, write the accession number on the tape using an archival pen (or even an indelible laundry marker), wash the tape in distilled water to remove any nasties, dry, and attach using a pair of very simple loose stitches - something even I, who am a bit of a klutz with a needle could do.
Given we don't have a conservation lab, probably the simplest would be to prepare the tags at home, and transport them tacked to a bit of acid free paper, and then attach them at the Athenaeum ...
I'm a sucker for stories about weird and wonderful objects found in library books and the like, so I was amused by the story of the finding of a photograph of a semi nude young woman in the 1898 excavation diary of Bernard Pyne Grenfell, one of the principal discoverers of the Oxyrhyncus Papyri.
The author of the original blog post points out that the hairstyle of the young woman is one associated more with the 1920's than the 1890's (if you want to have a look at the image you will need to click through to the original blog post).
At the same time I've been playing with Google Lens to help find the provenance of historical images, so on a whim, I decided to use Google Lens to identify the image.
This is not something that could have been done at the time of the original blog post - reverse image search tools such as Lens were not in common use and museums and picture sharing sites had not put their collections online to anything like the extent they have now.
Given the subject matter, as expected a Lens search brought up various online collections of vintage erotica - apparently this is a thing - and a number of companies, principally on Etsy, offering to sell high quality reproductions of the image suitable for framing - apparently this too is a thing.
However, the Etsy connection was useful, it identified the work as being by Albert Arthur Allen a well known 1920s photographer of female nudes who mostly worked in California.
The image concerned is usually dated to around 1929, however it was possibly taken earlier, but as Allen worked in the 1920s it certainly wasn't taken at the time of Grenfell's excavation diary.
In fact given that Grenfell died in 1926 and his papers were passed to the Egypt Exploration Society on his death it's entirely possible that someone other than Grenfell was responsible for slipping the image into his diary, perhaps as a bookmark ...
Behold!
