History is Awesome!

What I read

After Hours at Dooryard Books was really good - set in 1968 in a used bookstore in Greenwich Village - this was so not a Summer of Love - but lots of Unhistoric Acts - also I really liked that what I feared was going to be one of those three-quarter way through Exposure of Dark Thing/Arising of Unexpected Crisis in Relationship actually didn't go angst angst angst wo wo wo.

Slightly Foxed #88: 'Pure Magic': pretty good selection, though rather irked by the guy fanboying over Room at the Top and all he can say about the sexism side of things is that the protag's behaviour to women 'may be less than admirable but he is not a cad'. O RLY. What do you call putting the local rich guy's daughter in the club and then chucking your older woman mistress, who dies horribly in a car accident?

Robert Rodi, Fag Hag (1992) - of its period perhaps. I think there may be works of his I remember more fondly than this one? Don't really recommend.

Dick Francis, Hot Money (1987): this is one in which I was waiting for the narrator to get, as per usual for a DF protag, nastily done over, probably by one of his siblings or in-laws in this convoluted tale of seething envies within the family of a much-married tycoon. He did get blown up but that was not personal and so did his father. No actually woodsheds but there was a glasshouse and various other nooks and crannies to see something nasty in.

On the go

Back to Lanny Budd - O Shepherd, Speak! (#10) (1949) - Lanny as ever finds himself where it's happening in the final stages of WW2 - have got to the aftermath of the war, and thinking about peace. Quite a way to go.

Up next

No idea.

( In which the party begins a dangerous fight with a powerful warlock and his construct army to save the Grove and the paladin’s goddess )

We perceive that there does not appear to be any gender-confusion, or relationships with military helmets, connected with this particular tortoise, or maybe no-one noticed: Gramma the Galápagos tortoise, oldest resident of San Diego Zoo, dies at about 141. Not quite old enough to have met that there Charles Darwin, then.

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Reversal of Fates: Access Through Photographs can be a Counterbalance

Ongoing digitization and cataloging work not only serves the interests of scholars and manuscript communities—it also creates crucial, publicly-accessible provenance records that provide an increasingly robust bulwark against manuscript theft and trafficking.

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Thousands of rare American recordings — some 100 years old — go online for all to enjoy:

“A lot of that music from that era, the record companies did not keep backups. They were all destroyed, almost all. And it’s all up to the record collectors. They’re the ones who kind of saved the music from that era,”
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Superior to a random recording uploaded to YouTube with no accompanying information, the database includes things like where the song was recorded and when, as well as lists of musicians and composers who worked on the songs.

I think I may have mentioned at some time the phenomenon of the 'monkey walk': Before Tinder, there was the Monkey Parade… . Though some recent works read for review incline me to think that one reason for the decline not mentioned in that piece was the rise of the coffee-bar - indoors in the warm with a juke-box, and the site of massive 50s moral panic around The Young.

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Statue to 'remarkable' woman who escaped slavery:

A statue to a "remarkable and brave" woman who fled slavery and torture in the US has been unveiled in the fishing town in northern England where she found freedom.
Mary Ann Macham spent weeks hiding in woods in Virginia before stowing away on a ship, eventually arriving in North Shields in the early 1830s.
She was taken in by a Quaker family, married a local man and remained in the town until she died aged 91.