Xubuntu on an i5 based Thinkpad

 

I had an old Thinkpad running Windows 10 (and I do mean old - it's a 2013 vintage T440) that I used for the latter half of the Dow's project cataloguing, and for cataloguing the contents of Lake View.

I even used it for some of my work up at the Athenaeum before I changed over to using a Windows 11 based Acer Spin for my cataloguing work.

Since then it's basically just sat on my desk in the outside studio, so yesterday I decided to install Xubuntu on it.

Why Xubuntu and not full Ubuntu?

Well, Ubuntu's quite a big beast these days and given that the machine only had a 128GB SSD and 4MB of RAM, I thought a lighter weight distro might be a better choice, and anyway, I havn't played with Xubuntu for a few years. 

In fact not seriously since the 2000's when, for a couple of years I used it on an old PPC based iMac, although I did use it on and off as a lighter weight alternative to Ubuntu, before switching almost exclusively to Crunchbang as a preferred lightweight distro sometime around 2020.

So, download the image. Only available as a torrent but I did have µtorrent installed, so that wasn't an issue, just a little tedious.

I then ran Rufus to make myself an install USB.

As always I chose to write it using dd format rather than Rufus's default hybrid iso format, as over the years I've found that the dd format USB's boot and install more reliably.

Well not this time.

After it booted from the USB it sat there saying GRUB with a blinking cursor.

Basically it didn't work.

Googling produced all sorts of absurdly technical suggestions that I was not going to pursue, so I wiped the USB using diskpart and rewrote it using Rufus's hybrid ISO default.

This time it booted into the live environment and allowed me to install Xubuntu from there.

Once installed it rebooted cleanly.

I'm going to guess that the firmware had some strange mismatch with the bootable dd format USB but I don't really know.

I'm putting this down to experience. 

As I said, I've had trouble with hybrid format volumes not booting and always used to go for dd as the more reliable choice, but I've learned now to always try the hybrid volume if the other one fails...

Distraction free writing

 Back in August last year, I took an old Chromebook which had turned out not to be as useful as I hoped and installed Crunchbang++ Linux on it.

Inadvertantly, I seem to have made myself a distraction free writing machine.

Why? How?

Well, when it starts up there are no background programs running. No mail client, no virus checker, nothing. That and a very sparse interface - the OpenBox window manager in its default configuration reminds me of one of these eighties hacker games, where you started with a blank screen and had to guess the correct magic sequence of keys to get it to do anything.

So, want a text editor to knock out some dot points?

Right click and select 'text editor'. Being venerable, and having started before wysiwyg screen displays happened, I'm comfortable with markup and happily knock out dot pointers with Markdown style markup.

(if you prefer something a bit more wysiwyg focuswriter works well

giving you a distraction free editing experience and can produce .odt and .docx files as well as plain text if required)

If you want something a little less minimalist to produce a document with a bit of inline formatting I use Abiword - not the best or greatest word processor on the planet, but good enough for drafting a document, a blog post of whatever, and with the great benefit of being able to reliably save files as either .odt or .docx.

All these applications are small and light, and don't need an internet connection to work - offline working is fine. 

And needless to say, this solution is AI free, and the data stays in local storage until you actually decide to save it to some online storage solution.

That said, these days it's useless to pretend the internet doesn't exist, so I have firefox installed to let me check wikipedia etc, and having firefox installed means it's easy to upload the draft to somewhere cloudy, from where I usually finish it off on an Ubutu or Windows based device as appropriate.

The other reason it has turned out to be useful, is that the machine itself is small and light, but despite that, having been built for classroom use it's robustly made, and has a decent screen and a keyboard that's easy and comfortable to type on

even on your knees - not the most ergonomic way of working, but unlike using a bulkier or heavier device it's perfectly usable, even if cramped in a bus.

There's nothing special here, it's just a combination of form factor and operating environment, and as such, it's a recipe, not a design.

Any smaller laptop will do, for example a Lenovo Ideapad 1, or similar. If you're going to try going down this path, be aware that some older laptops, for example Dell Latitudes, can be a bit bulkier and heavier, and really need to be used on a desk or a fold out table on a train or bus.

And of course, the operating environment is important. The minimalism of the default setup of the OpenBox window manager means that it's distraction free out of the box...

Using the phone camera stand

 A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a 3D printed phone camera stand off of ebay.

At the time I said that the component fit was a little loose.

This means that the stand does not hold the phone at exactly 90° to the vertical, which leads to potential perspective distortion.

Using it to photograph small objects like coins this not a serious issue

any slight perspective distortion is hardly noticeable.

With larger objects such as postcards, it's a bit more of a problem

producing pictures where the top is a little wider than the bottom.

For practical purposes this does not matter, it's still perfectly legible for transcription purposes, but, aesthetically ...

Now I do a lot of my image transcription and manipulation on J's old imac, which runs Ubuntu, so any solution would have to be Linux based.

Googling mentioned perspec as an automatic utility, or as an alternative Darktable which is interactive, in that you manually select the image, run an automated perspective analysis tool, and then, if you like the result, bascially click on 'fix this please'.

After a little bit of trial and error I managed to produce this fixed image

which, I think you'll agree, is a bit better as regards perspective.

Quietly pleased, and certainly something I'll use again when preparing images for use in presentations and so on...

Hygenic Libraries in the 1950s

 I'd been assuming that hygenic libraries were a feature of the years between the first and second world wars, especially after the 1919 flu pandemic and subsequent repeat outbreaks, as well as several severe outbreaks of polio in Melbourne in the 1930s.

While it's true that the arrival of antibiotics after the second world war got rid of a whole range of bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis,  almost overnight, that was not the case with viral diseases such as polio - there was no effective vaccine until the mid 1950s, and treatment was still pretty basic.

So, it's probably no great surprise that commercial hygenic libraries persisted into the 1950s as seen in this library sticker inside a Mills and Boon romance published in 1952.

Perhaps, not such a surprise - I remember as a child in Scotland in the early 1960s (well before vaccination for measles, rubella and mumps) that library books from the city library came with a stern warning that in the event of an outbreak of disease in the household they should be returned not to the library but to the town medical officer for sterlisation. 

I even have a vague memory of going to the old mansion in Randolphfield (long gone, and now replaced by the police headquarters building) used as offices by the Chief Medical Officer with my mother to return books for sterilisation after a bout of chickenpox when I was seven or eight, which would make it 1963 or 64...

Cuts, cuts, cuts !

 It's that time of year when councils and state governments start to think about saving money, and inevitably they look at their GLAM services (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), and wonder if they can make some cost savings

which these days that usually means letting people go, which inevitably means a loss of expertise locally, and you can't just replace that expertise with a succession of interns.

Sure, they may be good technically, and some are very good, but they don't have the experience or indeed the social network that your now down sized archivist or conservator has built up over the years.

And when you complain you inevitably get comments along the lines of 'you can get it all on YouTube nowadays' or 'who needs libraries, Amazon provides a better service', comments that reveal complete ignorance on the part of our local legislators of what the GLAM services deliver.

I've worked in universities, I've worked in cultural institutions, and for ten years after I retired I volunteered with the National Trust on a collections documentation project, and now, because I like messing about with old documents, artefacts and computers, I'm cataloguing the historic book collection at Stanley Athenaeum, as well as the usual bits and pieces - first level IT support mostly - on the side.

The Athenaeum functions as a family history resource for the area and we get visitors from across Australia and New Zealand trying to trace how their forebears ended up where they did.

We're all volunteers. Quite a few of us won't see seventy again.

And inevitably, as we all get older, some of us will give up due to ill health, or just getting too old to do it any more - we have a continual struggle to attract and retain committed volunteers.

Some of us know about local and family history, and can coax valuable information out of  both Ancestry and the Public Records office with ease, some of us have a some sort of a heritage cum museum background and bring those skill to the table, and some of us are just interested. We're all experts in our own way, but we'd all admit that we have gaps in our skills and our knowledge.

And this is where having access to a funded resource like our local museums is invaluable, often to simply talk to one of the professional archivists or conservators.

Yes, it's true sometimes I use YouTube to find out how best to do something, but then we all do that, these days - even my GP does it, like when she says in the midst of a consultation "I'm not sure, I'll just check Google".

And as heritage services become more and more attenuated, and increasingly shift to a volunteer based model, local professional core institutions become more and more valuable for the support role they provide as a local centre of expertise and the specialist facilities they can provide, and indeed for providing continuity, given the inevitable churn among the volunteer community (and the loss of skills that goes with the churn).

And that's something you can't just get from a YouTube video...

A phone camera stand...

 Documenting small artefacts like coins at home is a pain.

They're small, they're fiddly and they need to be photographed at a fairly high resolution.

Often the best camera to hand is your phone, and holding it steady to get a straight down shot is tricky.

So, when an advert for a phone camera stand like this popped into my facebook feed, I was interested so I went digging and found the same items for sale a little cheaper on ebay

Well, it was only just over twenty bucks, so I thought I'd give it a go.

It arrived as a set of plastic bits (I'm guessing 3D printed) with no instructions

but assembly was fairly intuitive

and with my phone in place the end result looks like this

Assembled, it's a little wobbly - the fit of the components is not particularly tight, but the image quality produced is more than reasonable at a 320% zoom on my phone as in this image of a 1928 Irish Free State penny. (Incidentally, the phone used is nothing special, a mid range Android phone, an Oppo Reno 4 bought as a runout model in 2023. I'm guessing just about any standard form factor phone will work with the stand.)

For what it cost, I think I've got myself a bargain.

Obviously I could glue the bits together to make a more rigid structure, but I've decided to keep them as is for the moment, as that will make the item more easily transportable in one of my gear boxes for onsite documentation ...

Well it's Friday, so it's cataloguing time

 After last week's hiatus, it was back to normal with my Friday cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum.

No real finds this week but a couple of little items that connected with other things I've written about recently.

In the end papers of a copy of Dan the Dollar by Shan Bullock, and published in the early 1900's by Maunsell's in Dublin, there's an advert for a literary magazine, edited by W.B. Yeats, which uses Irish script for items written in Irish. 

I've written elsewhere about how, before 1916, Irish intellectuals self consciously used Irish script to construct an Irish identity separate from the prevailing Anglo Irish identity. It's interesting to see it used in print as early as 1905 as well as in handwritten communications such as postcards.

The other interesting item was a bookseller's label fro Stephen's in Melbourne on an 1866 book by Elihu Burritt describing a walk from London to John O'Groats in the far north of Scotland.

As the accession registers are missing we have no idea when and from where the Athenaeum acquired the book but I'll wave my hands about and guess some time between 1866 and 1876.

What's interesting is that the sticker says 'New Books, Magazines and Newspapers received by every mail steamer'.

This of course meant books and magazines imported from England, as well as newspapers, and suggests that Stephens had a regular order for English newspapers and magazines, as well as for new books.

While it's not quite the same Orwell, in Burmese Days, his novel based on his experiences in colonial Burma in the 1920s, talks of going to an English language bookshop in Rangoon to look at the latest books from England. So too it must have been in Melbourne in the 1860s and 70s before books began to be printed locally.

Before Australia was connected by telegraph in the 1870s to the rest of the planet, newpapers brought by mail steamers were the principal source of overseas news (There's the probably apocryphal story of a wealthy member of the squatocracy who had a copy of that day's Times of London posted to him every day, and when they arrived in batches via the mail steamer, stacked them in order and read them one at a time with breakfast.)

What it also shows is the importance of the mail reaching the mail steamer in time, and hence the use by the postal service of a 'Too Late' postmark when the mail missed the boat (literally)...

Leaving Evernote

 I've been an Evernote user since 2011, however the latest round of price increases have finally persuaded me to bite the bullet and close my account. This isn't because it's a bad product, it's simply that I'm paying a lot for features that are of no use to me - as it has added AI based features and group working tools it has moved a long way away from what was simply a very good records management solution.

Closing my account of means moving my content out of Evernote and to somewhere or something else.

I'm going to tell you how I did it - I was not particularly clever in the way I approached it, but then the simplest approaches are often the best.

It's important to understand how I used Evernote to understand why my approach worked for me.

I used Evernote as a standard records management system - basically a database which allows you to search and index content and stores your content in an object store of some sort.

What I didn't use was the group working and clever new AI based tools it now comes with.

When I first started with Evernote back in 2011 it was good, really good. So good that I used my own hard earned cash to buy a subscription to the product.

The fact it was multi platform was great - it meant you could go to a meeting, whip out an iPad and pull up the relevant document in a few clicks.

Nowadays, as opposed to the situation in 2011, there are a number of products out there that can happily function as a basic records management solution - Standard Notes, OneNote and even the open source Notable.app will do this - I'm sure there are others. 

But of course, I'm retired, so why do I need a records management solution?

Well, the world's gone digital. Invoices come as emailed pdf's, as do utility bills, various legal documents and so on, so in the same way as once you would have had a drawer of household files, now you need somehwere where you can find a copy of your house or car insurance, or a copy of a utilty bill.

Like everyone else on the planet I was never very good at clearing out the old material, so a certain amount of cruft had built up, so the first thing I did was go through all my evernote notebooks and reduce them to a manageable size - this got rid of about 75% of my Evernote content.

But how to migrate it, and what to migrate it to?

Pragmatically, the answer was Microsoft's OneNote - I already had quite a lot of work related material from my work with the National Trust in OneNote, so I knew it could do the job, I had plenty of storage free, and more importantly there was a freely available migration tool that allowed you to import an .enex format Evernote notebook export file into OneNote.

So having pruned my content, I exported each of my Evernote notebooks as an .enex file, then ran the conversion tool.

Also, as I'm a paranoid bugger, I've saved all my .enex exports to a directory on OneDrive, just in case I need to go back to them. Remarkably it's only about half a gigabyte of data, so it doesn't add much to my overall storage usage.

Randomly opening some note in the imported notebooks suggests everything's there. I perhaps need to do a little bit of renaming and tidying and a bit more checking, but basically I seem to have got everything out of Evernote that I wanted to.

Then all that remains is the matter of cancelling your subscription.

You need to be strong, as they will make a number of counter offers - in my case a 45% discount on the renewal cost - and I must admit to being tempted - but just keep clicking cancel. You never quite escape, they leave you with a free subscription just in case you have a change of heart.

Then it's simply a matter of uninstalling the clients from the various computers I use, in my case the laptop on my desk, the machine I use for cataloguing and the laptop I take travelling, plus an ipad and an android tablet, and my phone.

Most of the others - basically Windows 10 machines that I havn't quite decided what to do with can wait, and as Evernote never did do a Linux client that's not an issue to worry about.

Another day's cataloguing

 Glorious blue sky but absolutely freezing this morning up at the Athenaeum with ice in the outside toilet washbasin until noon.

However, this time I had the sense to wear a pair of wool socks, coupled with a merino t-shirt under my jumper, so I stayed warm, even if I perhaps looked a bit like the Michelin man.

As an experiment we've replaced the classic cardboard tent moth traps with dome traps, with the idea that the contents will be less likely to leak and damage the books or artefacts if they get forgotten about or if the liquid starts to flow more than expected over a run of hot summer days

Cataloguing itself was fairly straightforward with the usual mix of late nineteenth century sensation novels that have been long forgotten such as this 1874 potboiler, still with Mudie's labels on the cover

and the usual mix of cirme and mystery novels from the 1930s and 40s. It's noticable how poor the quality of the paper is in the nineteen thirties, and especially the nineteen forties novels, compared with that of sensation novels from the 1870s and 1880s.

I'm ascribing this to printers still using either rag paper or paper made from mixture of rag and woodchip pulp in the nineteenth century, but by the 1930s they were using woodchip almost exclusively.

The nineteen forties books are particularly bad - something that I put down to war time economy measures and a mix of recycled paper and virgin pulp, producing paper that after eighty years is distinctly yellow and brittle, and will almost certainly be a conservation challenge down the track...

Juvenal or Juvenile

 The last week or so, my bedtime reading has been Lindsey Davis's 'Murder in Purple and Gold' which takes place against the background of the Roman Floralia festival.

I must confess to a weakness for Lindsey Davis's Roman mysteries, and despite being complete fantasy, they are impeccably researched and the background is accurate.

Now, despite my deep fascination with Roman history, I didn't know much about Floralia. 

This isn't unusual, there's not that much known other than the festival is said to have been implemented around 238BCE during the early, not quite mythical, period of the republic and was in response to a series of very wet cold springs.

In an agrarian society, dependent on what they could grow locally, which was the case in the early republic, a series of wet cold springs when the crops didn't start to grow properly meant hunger, and possibly starvation. It's possible that this was due to volcanic activity, but no one really knows.

Anyway Floralia started as a festival of fertility and new growth. What form it took at the beginning  is not known, or even whether there had been some earlier agrarian festivals that were formalised into Floralia.

Fast forward to the end of the first century CE.

Floralia was still going strong. Unlike many Roman religious festivals it was light on austere ceremony and had evolved into a raunchy raucous celebration of life including naked acrobats of both sexes, nude dancing  and naked prostitutes dressed up as gladiators (basically minimal pretend armour and not a lot else) engaging in mock gladiator fights.

Well that's what we think anyway. Actual written sources are fairly sparse. There's a reference to Cato going into a tent where a naked comedy was being performed, and walking out in disgust, some prim later writers expressing po-faced disapproval, and the satirist Juvenal, who provides some fairly ambiguous descriptions of what went on in satire#6.

Basically, it seems to be the case that everyone knew what went on, the Roman fun police disapproved, and not many people wrote about it, or if they did, what they wrote didn't survive.

And this is my cautionary tale.

Being a geek, I thought I'd see what various historians had written about Juvenal's descriptions of Floralia and the associated events by searching for

'juvenal naked dancers floralia'

which while it might not be the sort of thing you would do at work, is eminently justifiable as a search.

Unfortunately Google didn't think so, decided I couldn't spell juvenile, and cautioned me about searching for abusive material.

Perhaps I should have capitalised juvenal, or omitted his name entirely from the search string, but there you go, what's done is done.

Incidentally, this isn't the first time I've had problems with the word juvenile. 

While documenting the contents of Lake View, I came across a number of children's books produced by a company called Juvenile Productions in the 1930s that seems to have little or no trace of itself. Most of the books are reprints of earlier children's stories, and had titles that included words like 'fairy'.

At the time of publication there was probably no hint of nastiness linked to the title, but now, we live in a different world...

Moth traps - a cautionary tale

 Well, we had a near miss up at the Athenaeum today.

Like a lot of similar bodies we use sticky moth traps a bit like the ones below to minimise the risks of insect damage 

all good.

Good practice is that you put the moth traps in the display cabinets, date them, check them in a month or so, and either replace them or remove them as not required.

These traps work by having a layer of glue on the base of the triangle and the idea is that the insect or other nasty gets caught in the glue.

And now for the cautionary part of the story.

I was cataloguing some nineteenth century novels this morning and found a moth trap that had been placed on top of the novels in the display case.

The books had been wrapped in mylar bags (a bit like kitchen ziplocs) as they were in poor condition, with broken spines, insect damage and the like.

The insect traps had been dated to late 2019/early 2020 and had not been removed or replaced, and the glue, which is thixotropic, had flowed off the trap and on to the mylar bags.

Fortunately no damage had been done to the books and it was simply a matter of removing the moth trap and then replacing the sticky bags with new ones.

The dates are significant, just before the pandemic when everything was locked down, and importantly, a lot of voluntary organisations saw a significant turn over, with people simply not coming back after the lockdowns were over, and other people taking their place.

This of course meant that any handover of duties was patchy at best, and some things simply got missed.

The solution is simple, a search and destroy mission for any other outdated moth traps, as well as checking for damage, and putting in place a task calendar to ensure that the traps are checked regularly in the future.

And why am I airing our dirty linen in public like this?

Well, we're not the only volunteer run organisation in the world, and I'm sure other organisations must have had a breakdown in procedure like we did.

And I'd like to emphasise that no one did the wrong thing, it's just that in a period of churn things get lost. In this case we got away with it, another time we might not be so lucky...

it's been a Wilkie Collins sort of a day...

As usual, I had my morning cataloguing up at the Athenaeum, and this morning it was Wilkie Collins, one of my favourite nineteenth century authors.

Strangely, unless it's been misclassified and I'm yet to find it, we don't appear to have a copy of The Woman in White, which is perhaps his best known novel today.

This isn't terribly unusual - the Woman in White was incredibly popular when it first appeared, and it's possible that the book simply wore out and was not replaced. As I've said before the accession registers and other paperwork relating to the early days of the Athenaeum's library have disappeared

The Woman in White made Wilkie Collin's reputation, even inspiring a cartoon by his friend John Leech depicting a housholder, engrossed in his novel being ordered to come to bed by his wife.

What we do have is a second edition of the Moonstone, unfortunately volume three is missing

which was clearly sourced second hand from Mullen's as the books have remnant Mullen's circulating library labels, 

a copy of Poor Miss Finch that dates from 1872 that was probably bought new by the Athenaeum, copies of his early novels Antonina and Basil that have been professionally rebound, suggesting that they were reasonably popular and even a yellowback edition of Miss or Mrs from the end of the nineteenth century suggesting Wilkie Collins remained popular throughout his lifetime and beyond

Other than that, it was the usual mix of late Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels, interwar mysteries and 1950s romance novels...

Bottles documented (and a few books)

 Well after last week's unplanned cancellation, it was back to cataloguing the bottles as promised, as well as a few more books in the historic book collection

the job itself was fairly straightforward, and as I'd carefully packed up a box with my little Linux documentation laptop, some weights to hold the background down, right angled rulers etc it seemed to be really quick - actually it took me about an hour due to being out of practice in assembling a documentation package, but I got there.

I'm happy that the procedure, derived from my work with both Lake View and Dow's is robust. My only real worry is the use of excel format for the spreadsheet - its use is only part of my procedure because originally the National Trust had a workflow where they converted the excel spreadsheets automagically to  csv for ingest to their archive management system.

It could be argued that instead of xlsx I should have used ods, or indeed generated a csv format file to ensure the long term accessibility of the data.

In this case I don't think it matters over much, but just for fun I added an ods and csv subdirectory with the supplementary spreadsheets

and replaced the manifest.txt file with an updated version to reflect this change.

Other than that it was simply a case of yet more documentation of the historic book collection.

No spectacular finds, just mid century romance and mystery novels, which perhaps reflects a post war desire for a touch of colour and escapism, but I did find one book that had previously belonged to a circulating library in Melbourne operated by Myer's ...

Not a lot of progress

 Well, the bottles I planned to document yesterday are still undocumented, and I didn't catalogue any of the historic book collection either. I'd had to cancel my morning working up at the Athenaeum due to unforeseen circumstances.

As I alluded to elsewhere, J was due to have a minor medical procedure as day surgery earlier this week, and it turned into one of these things where the wheels come off - because she ended up having to stay overnight and wasn't discharged when we thought she would be, our whole carefully planned schedule fell apart.

We were late home, missed picking the cat up from the cat motel, etc, etc etc...

Well, these things happen, and when they do you just have to roll with it, and sometimes things have to cancelled or reorganised, and one of these things was my morning at the Athenaeum.

However I did do a fair part of the preparation before hand, checking camera batteries were charged, firing up the documentation computer to do any necessary updates, and making up a base recording spreadsheet.

It's a fairly specific job, so I don't need all of my documentation kit, just a couple of scales, a micrometer and a set of glass weights to hold the backdrop down, which will all fit in a simple plastic carry box, and of course my trusty digital SLR to take high resolution images, and certainly easier than taking the whole documentation kit which fills a couple plastic boxes these days.

Once the bottles are documented, I'll make up a little documentation package, one copy of which I'll save to OneDrive and the other I'll write to a USB stick to be squirreled away and archived ...

Bottles (again)

 Up at the Athenaeum, one of my colleagues brought in three glass bottles found while digging in her garden and asked me to take a look at them.

The bottles all look to be from the first half of the twentieth century, and are fairly generic examples of medicine bottles.

This first one is a fairly generic clear glass bottle of the sort used to package aspirin and similar over the counter medicines.

The second one is a little more interesting. Made from brown glass, which has become slightly crazed over the years, it has Faulding embossed on one of the narrower faces of the bottle. Faulding is a long established Australian manufacturer of over the counter remedies.

The bottle is not ribbed or dimpled suggesting it orginally contained a non prescription medicine.

The final bottle is potentially more interesting, consisting of a narrow clear glass cylinder. Close examination showed that it still had a label in white paint on the bottle, albeit faded and worn.

Playing about with the image using Microsoft photo editor brought up the words 'Nyal Cold Sore'.

Like Faulding, Nyal is a long established Australian brand of off the shelf pharmaceutical products. Experience documenting Nyal products at Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern suggests that the form of the logo used - with its distinctive lower case 'y' - means that the bottle dates to the late 1950s or early 1960s

The plan is to document them fully next week, using the folksonomy I developed for the Dow's documentation project. The items are fairly generic and we are not a collecting institution, so once documented we will offer them to a local museum - unlike many bottles, these ones most definitely have a provenance...

Finding Louisa

Following on from finding that one of Louisa Crow’s stories was republished in the New York Times, I thought I’d do a very simple search of Trove, Papers Past NZ, and Welsh Newspapers Online to see if her stories were also being republished elsewhere.

As I said, it’s strange how someone who, while a popular hack novelist of her time, seems to have completely dropped out of the canon of nineteenth century novelists.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable in her writing serial stories for magazines, quite a few of her peers did the same thing, only to have their serials republished as a three decker. Dickens did the same, as did Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

And newspapers, especially the weekly papers, and papers in rural areas liked to have a serialised novel, if only to attract repeat purchases of the paper. The social historian David Kerr Cameron has recorded the importance of the Friday or Saturday paper in rural Scotland in the nineteenth century, where often the weekly newspaper was the only reading matter in a croft, other than a Bible.

The literary historian Katherine Bode has investigated a similar phenomenon in rural Australia, and has uncovered lost novels which only appear to have been published as newspaper serials.

So, to the search.

Trove and PapersPast NZ differentiate between newspapers and magazines. In both cases I searched for the occurrences of the string Louisa Crow - this reliably brought up mentions of her. Searching for Mrs L Crow did not improve the results, suggesting that she was principally known as Louisa Crow.

A search of Welsh Newspapers online shows frequent mentions in book reviews and in advertising for new books and issues of the Quiver suggesting some popularity. She does not appear to be credited for any serialised novels - I’m not sure why - it could be that she simply wasn’t particularly popular in English speaking Wales.

As a sanity check I later reran the search on the SLV's copy of Gale NewVault, and both her stories and poems seem to have been syndicated to a wide range of English, Scottish and Irish newspapers, which suggests that perhaps the results from Welsh Newspapers Online are an anomaly.

On the other hand a search of Trove shows that her stories were reprinted in various country newspapers of the time in Australia and she was thought worthy of mention in various booksellers adverts, and strangely one of her stories was reprinted in the Presbyterian calendar of 1893 - a church annual magazine.

As in Wales, she seems to have been less popular in New Zealand, with very few hits in Papers Past. As in the case of Wales I can only wave my hands, I don’t know enough about nineteenth century newspaper publishing in New Zealand to speculate meaningfully.

So, where does this leave us?

Well, Louisa Crow was well enough known to be mentioned in the Times of London of 01 January 1896 in their list of significant personages who had died in the previous year, as well as earning a couple of obituaries in literary periodicals of the time.

However, as I’ve said, she seems to have almost completely dropped out of the literary canon since her death, which I guess simply shows just how fleeting fame can be...

Mrs Crow continues to confuse

 Yesterday, up at the Athenaeum, I had some fun tracing Louisa Crow, a nineteenth century female novelist.

We hold a copy of one of her novels, yet the novel is not listed in either the British Library or National Library of Scotland catalogues.

Normally I use Google to search, but given the paucity of information about Mrs Crow, I thought to rerun the search using both Bing and Yandex, to see if they turned up anything else.

As is sometimes the case Yandex produced some search results that surprised me:

Firstly a link to the  New York Times of August 12 1866, which features a short story, Hazeley Mill, by Louisa Crow. (It also features a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, exalted company indeed for someone usually considered a Victorian hack novelist.)

Secondly, a link to an 1866 illustration held by Aberystwyth University for a story Hazeley Mill in Once a Week magazine, a magazine Louisa Crow published in.But was it really Louisa Crow?

Well the Hathi Trust archive of Once a Week  from 1866 includes Louisa Crow's story, so I am guessing that in the way of nineteenth century newspapers, the Times republished the story, and indeed it does credit it as coming from Once a Week.

The dates fit, meaning I think we can be confident that the story is by "our" Louisa Crow, even if it does not appear in the usual lists of her short stories on Victorian literature and Victorian studies sites.

It's interesting how someone who obviously had some sort of reputation can almost totally disappear from literary history...

Louisa, you have led me a merry dance...

 Up at the Athenaeum today I had a good day's cataloguing, mostly of Victorian lady novelists.

That has its own challenges, like those books published by "the Author of Lord Halifax's Nose" - I made that up, but it's uncomfortably close to the truth, or authors who publish books under their maiden name, get married, and then publish under their married name.

Annoying, but there's so much in the way of Victorian literary studies out there it's relatively easy to run them down - quite often there are name authority files out there, if you can find them.

I find that the National Library of Scotland is a bit better than the British Library in publishing name authorities, but working between the two of them you can usually identify both the author and the edition.

In fact it's quite amazing I can do this sat at the end of a wireless nbn connection in an old wooden building on the far side of the planet - fifteen or twenty years ago this simply wouldn't have been possible, or if it was, it would have been a hell of a lot more slog.

So I was feeling quietly confident when I came across a book published in 1873 by a Mrs L Crow - A Twisted Link, published by Tinsley brothers in London.

Only one problem - it's not in either the NLS or BL catalogues. It's not in the Library of Congress either.

Google books wasn't much help either, other than showing that the book was listed in various nineteenth century public library and mechanics institute catalogues that had been digitised.

Clearly I wasn't delusional, I had the book on my desk, and however short its print run it had been picked up by other libraries at the time.

from the GWR Mechanics Institute Catalogue 1888

Montrose Public Library 1896

But who was Mrs L Crow?

Well I ended up searching wikipedia for pages containing the phrase 'A Twisted Link' and found that her full name was Louisa Elizabeth Crow and that her maiden name was Fenn.

There's also an entry for her on victorianresearch.org.

So, back I went to both the NLS and the BL to search for "Louisa Crow".

That turned up various of her other novels, but not 'A Twisted Link'.

Searching for Louisa Fenn OR Crow didn't improve matters one jot.

Google Books was a little better and provided a stub entry, but nowhere seems to hold a copy.

By 1873, legal deposit in England was firmly in place and publishers were prosecuted for failing to comply with the legal deposit regulations, so I can only guess that someone at Tinsley Brothers stuffed up and didn't send out the legal deposit copies...

So, how's the facebook thing going?

 Almost three years ago, at the end of the pandemic I made the decision to abandon social media.

I closed my accounts, deleted my profiles and did the digital equivalent of going to live in a hut in the bush, with only an old manual typewriter for company.

Sure, I still blogged, and I did keep my mastodon account, but for all intents and purposes I had walked out the door.

I did this because, post pandemic, I felt I was spending too much time on social media and it was time for a break.

And it worked.

And then, a few months ago I rejoined facebook.

Quite consciously and deliberately as part of my work with the historic book collection at the Athenaeum.

In its early days, the Athenaeum was clearly buying second hand books from large commercial circulating libraries as Mullen's in Melbourne and Mudies in London, and, while I have no proof I'm fairly certain that they were buying them from second hand book dealers who imported their stock from England.

This makes perfect sense - books were expensive in the Victorian England of the 1860s and 70s, and doubly so in Australia, where the lack of local publishers meant they were almost all imported from England, although a few were imported from the United States.

Some of the books I presume were sourced from England had stickers suggesting they were the property of smaller local circulating libraries, quite often in coastal resorts where the middle classes of Victorian England would spend their summers, either in improving pursuits such as rockpooling as in this satirical illustration from Punch in the 1860s

or indeed reading frivolous novels, or perhaps both or indeed something else entirely. 

Often the only way of tracking down information on these circulating libraries was to contact local history groups to ask if anyone knew anything about a particular circulating library.

A lot of these groups don't have a web page or a contact email, instead they have a facebook page, and the only practical way to contact them was via Facebook, which meant my getting myself a Facebook account (again - as I'd deleted my old account and all my contacts).

So, I did.

And as a means of initiating contact with these local history groups it has worked well.

While the dread facebook algorithm does tend to show you the same material over and over again, and does operate on the 'if you liked that, try this' model it has not come up with any inappropriate content after the first week or so when it had a predilection to suggest various mad right wing flag waving groups.

Likewise, this time around it has not come up with any really silly friend suggestions - one of the things that I used to dislike about facebook first time around were the spurious friend requests from somewhat over endowed young women, all of whom seemed to live in West Texas.

So far, everything all seems above board, and while there are way too many adverts for my taste, everything seems reasonably innocuous.

In fact the one time I saw an advert I felt was sailing close to the wind as regards advocating violence and complained about it, the helpdesk wrote back to say that other people had already complained about it and the advert had been removed and the account banned.

So, basically it's ok. I did worry initially that it was a bit of a swamp, but this time, perhaps not as much as I feared ...

The things one finds in old books ...

 Despite still feeling a bit raw after Lucy's passing, I had my usual Friday morning cataloguing session at the Athenaeum.

Nothing of great interest, some 1940s and fifties bodice rippers, and quite a bit of Dickens.

Some of the Dickens editions are quite old, one is a Chapman and Hall edition of Little Dorrit dating to 1861, and others look to be equally old, and form part of the same series, but have irritatingly lost their title pages.

Others date from the 1930s and seem to have been bought deliberately to replace earlier copies which have worn out beyond repair.

However, the old editions were still in use until the closure of the Athenaeum as a library in the early 1970s

An old Melbourne tram ticket used as a bookmark, and we can date it to sometime between 1966 when Australia abandoned the old British £sd system for the rather more prosaic dollars and cents we use today, and 1972 when the Athenaeum ceased to function as the village library.

Another nice little example of using ephemera to date when an item was last used ...

Swapping out my old Thinkpad for an Acer Travelmate

 Last week, Ausnet left the Athenaeum in the dark (literally) while they carried out preventative maintenance in advance of winter.

Up till then I'd used my old Thinkpad, the one I'd used to document both Lake View  and part of Dow's pharmacy for the National Trust.

As I'd feared, the Thinkpad's battery is not what it was, and I ended up swapping over to an Acer Travelmate I'd originally bought as a second machine for J.

Last week's power shenanigans convinced me to try shifting to using the Travelmate full time for my cataloguing work.

As you'd suspect, it coped comfortably with this morning's cataloguing session, leaving me with just over half a battery's worth of power when I shut down.

I thought the smaller screen might be a problem, but in practice it turned out not to be.

It's going to be the Travelmate for cataloguing work until further notice...

Prayer and hymn books

 Today I started work creating stub catalogue entries for those prayer books and hymn books we decided to record and save.

Needless to say they are all very similar. Most were printed by James Nisbet,  a major publisher of hymn books and prayer books in the nineteenth century.

Interestingly, as well as the short hand annotation on the fly leaf, it's worth noting that this particular book was printed by the Australian publisher George Robertson, who also published Australian editions of yellow backs and other English novels.

Bible, hymn books and prayer books were in steady demand in the nineteenth century and it was probably well worth George Robertson's time to enter into agreement to produce Australian reprints of the standard editions.

James Nisbet, was one of these irritating Victorian publishers who didn't put publication dates or other identifying information on their books. Perhaps they thought that the word of the Lord was immutable and you didn't need to distinguish between printings and editions.

It's particularly annoying in the case of some of the early books, however some of the early books have dates

as in the case of this bible printed by Eyre and Spotiswood for the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1856.

Gratifyingly, someone has added 'Stanley Sunday School 1863' to the fly leaf. 

1863 is quite an important date in the history of Stanley as it's when the Athenaeum was founded and Stanley was changing from a rough and ready goldminers' camp to a more permanent settlement.

We know that the Sunday School used the Athenaeum building in the early days of the settlement. It's got to be remembered that even though the state school (No 550) dates from 1858 as part of the early national School system, education was not compulsory until 1872, and Sunday Schools, besides religious education, often provided basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic for children who did not attend school full time as they were needed on the farm or were employed as 'picky boys' helping to sort ore from general spoil and tailings.

Joseph King's cheap circulating library in Norwich

 

One of our items is an 1841 edition of The Heiress and and her Suitors, which has a stamp from Joseph King’s Cheap Circulating Library in Norwich.

1841 is unusually early for the collection - we have very few books from the mid 1850s as the Athenaeum was only founded in 1863. What we do know is that many books were bought second hand from book importers some of whom bought up stock from failed circulating libraries in the UK.

Searches of those trade directories for Norwich and surrounding towns which are available online (principly via the Universith of Leicester) do not list Joseph King’s library

 ➜  a circulating library run by King and Baker in Bridewell is listed in the 1845 edition of White’s directory

 ➜ no circulating library owned by anyone known as King is listed in the 1854 directory

 ➜ no directories from the late 1850s/early 1860s are available online

with kind assistance from Darren Armstrong of the Norwich Heritage Centre, Belinda Kilduff of the Norwich records office, not to mention invaluable help from Hannah Henderson and Bethan Holdridge of the Norwich Museums service in pointing me in the right direction, I think I can now make up a story.

King and Baker’s circulating library was in business in the early 1850’s but was not listed in any trade directory after 1856.

The Norwich Heritage Centre actually holds a catalogue for King and Baker’s library which lists the Heiress and her Suitors as one of the books available.

Unfortunately the catalogue is undated.

However we can imagine the following scenario: 

• King and Baker were in partnership until sometime after 1854 when the business ceased. - King tried to continue the business but was unsuccessful and the stock sold 
• We know there were brokers who bought second hand book from circulating libraries, including failed ones, for export to Australia 
•  It’s more than a tenable suggestion that King’s stock was bought up and exported to Australia. 
• As the Athenaeum library did not start until 1863 it’s possible that the book may have been in use elsewhere and resold before coming to Stanley, but the evidence would seem to suggest that it would be one of the earler acquisitions in the historic book collection

Dust jackets

 Earlier today I tooted a link to an online article on the history of dust jackets - you know, these paper sheets folded around hardback books.

Working with historical library books up at the Athenaeum, I don't get a lot of time with dust jackets - those from the 1920s and 30s are mostly gone as are the majority of those on later books, although sometimes the dustjacket illustration has been pasted on the cover like this

which I'm guessing was just something someone did.

The interesting thing is that dust jackets didn't really appear until the 1920s.

Before then, while yellowbacks and other mass produced books had illustrated covers, sometimes in colour, more expensive books did not, although, perhaps following the trend for illustrated covers, increasingly hardback books did have some form of decoration on the cover, sometimes in monochrome, sometimes with a little colour.

Designs varied from simple floral designs

to illustrated

to those with a little colour in them

I'm going to wildly wave my hands here and suggest that sometime around 1920 the paper dustjacket was introduced, perhaps because that reduced production costs, allowing books to be produced with simple minimalist covers, and also, perhap because it was a way of making hardbacks as attractive as these pesky paperbacks that were making inroads into mass market publications...