Archives have a delightful way of reminding us that nothing is new. A set of rough (very rough) drawings that decorate the margins of this manuscript Latin-...
While we are on ABC books, it seems appropriate to point out the richly imagined work of R. André, a pen name for William Roger Snow, a London-born playwright...
ABC books are designed to teach children their letters, paving the way toward reading. They developed from horn books of the fifteenth century and rely upon a...
Commonplace books are often a delightfully rich source of the wit and wisdom of centuries gone by. The commonplace book compiled by James Moore of East Dereham...
The swift downfall of Queen Anne Boleyn in May 1536 (see: “ From my doleful prison in the Tower ”) is talked about perhaps as much today as it was when the...
Readers would be hard-pressed to find a better point of entry into the imaginary world of Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear, Piglet, Roo, Rabbit and Eeyore than...
Mention the author and illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans, and most people think of his yellow-hatted heroine, Madeleine. Bemelmans won a Caldecott in 1954 for...
When Anthony Trollope began writing the last Palliser novel, The Duke’s Children , he made swift dispatch of a much-loved character in the series: Lady...
That ingenious gentleman from La Mancha, familiarly known to readers as Don Quixote , was introduced to the world by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra in 1605...
Marbled endpapers, like these that line the covers of a twentieth-century fine-press edition of Keats’s letters, sometimes can stand as works of art in their...
