* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library
I love fireworks and I love vintage books and catalogs, so this is near-perfect find and yet another amazing collection to delve into. — Douglas
In the early 20th-century English fireworks company C.R. Brock and Company (now known as Brocks Fireworks) published colorful catalogs displaying designs from Japanese companies such as Hirayama Fireworks and Yokoi Fireworks. Six catalogs of diverse pyrotechnic diagrams have been digitized and made available for download thanks to the city of Yokohama’s public library. If you don’t read Japanese, you can download each publication’s PDF by visiting their website, clicking one of the book’s English titles near the bottom of the page, and then clicking “本体PDF画像” link below the image. Each catalog is a tremendous and varied selection of the firework shapes and colors of the time, with several designs you might recognize no matter where you view contemporary fireworks displays. (via Open Culture)
Another, great, free, online resource for the art lovers among us. I can say I have flipped through many of these books at the Getty over the years so it will be great to finally spend some leisurely time reading and viewing them. — Douglas
In 2014, Getty Publications announced the launch of its Virtual Library, where readers can freely browse and download 325 art books from the publisher’s backlist catalogue. The Virtual Library consists of texts associated with several Getty institutions. Readers can view extensively researched exhibition catalogues from the J. Paul Getty Museum, including Paul Cézanne’s late-life watercolours, when the painter raised the still life to a high art (Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, 2004), as well as the woefully underappreciated Flemish illustrations of the 15th and 16th centuries (Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript, 2003).
The collection also contains detailed treatises on art conservation from the Getty Conservation Institute, and scholarly works from the Getty Research Institute, both of which include a multitude of books on specialized topics. Fancy reading about the relationship between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, the two legendary 17th century painters who lived in the Netherlands’ city of Antwerp? There’s a book on that.
Amazing puppets in this short Great Big Story video. I am always amazed at the power of puppets and how puppeteers can bring them to life even when they remain visible in controlling their creations. — Douglas
Puppets—they’re child’s play, right? Spend five minutes watching Barnaby Dixon and you’ll surely disagree. At first, it might seem strange for a 26-year-old to be hand-building puppets in his bedroom and shooting videos of his performances for a living, but the puppet prodigy’s creations are completely original and totally addicting to watch. Barnaby started his career solely to make YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/barnabyd…), but recently hit it big after winning a 50,000 Euro grand prize on the German puppet talent show, “Die Puppenstars.”
Doing my husbandly duty recording @drrosannewelch Presenting her Talk – The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know and Love
There is a geeky community for nearly everything in the world and pens — yes, pens for writing — is one of them. Sure you have the fountain pen collectors and users, but even the humble felt tip, rollerball and ball-points have their community. In this case, The Strategist has developed a method of rating pens of all types and quantifying how each measures up so you don’t have too.
Yes, I am a geek in many things and pens could be considered one of them. I certainly have my preferences in pen and ink types I dislike ballpoints with a passion and look towards rollerball or fountain pens as my go-to writing instrument.
What’s your favorite writing instrument? Check out how it rates in the exhaustive list below!
At its most basic, a pen has to do just one thing, but there are so many reasons to choose one over another. Does it glide along the page, or does it drag? Does the ink flow in a smooth line, or is it unpredictable? Does the pen feel good or would note-taking cramp your hand? And how does it look? With so many varieties out there, from plastic ballpoints sold by the dozen to thousand-dollar fountain pens hunted down by collectors, we became determined to find the very best pens for everyday use.
* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library
More intellectual enrichment for FREE with these museum books. Expand your mind! — Douglas
You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.”
If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs.
I regularly watch these Gresham College lectures on a variety of topics — probably around 3-4 lectures a month, depending on the topics. Lectures like this have been by own version of a Master’s Degree, since I am not that fond of classroom learning. With each lecture, you gain quite a deep understanding of the topic at hand and often there are 3-5 lectures that follow a theme over the course of few months. — Douglas
Gresham College was founded in 1597 and has been providing free lectures within the City of London for over 400 years.
The College was established out of the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, one of the most influential and important men across the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. Sir Thomas made himself indispensable as the financial agent for four successive monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. As well as founding the Royal Exchange, Sir Thomas left proceeds in his will for the foundation of Gresham College.
This lecture re-examines how the First World War ended. Why did Germany request a ceasefire and why did the Allies and America grant one?
This lecture will re-examine how the First World War ended, anticipating the centenary commemorations in 2018. It will discuss both why Germany requested a ceasefire, and why the Allies and America granted one. It will argue that the German army was near collapse, and that Germany was not defeated by a ‘stab in the back’ at home. None the less, the Allies had good reasons not to press on to Berlin.
While there is something special in seeing famous artwork in-person, having access online is certainly better than having no access at all and The Art Institute of Chicago has opened up a huge collection of images from artwork in their collection. Even better, you can poke, prod and get an up-close view (through zooming) at these images without the security guard chasing you away. (SMILE) This sometimes happens to me as I like to get close to see brush work and how the paint is laid upon the canvas. — Douglas
The Art Institute of Chicago recently announced the release of tens of thousands of images from their collection to the public domain, providing high resolution access to the thick paint strokes of Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom,” the eerie light of Edvard Munch’s “The Girl by the Window,” or the pointillism used in George Seurat’s famous “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884.″ The works have been made available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which presents the works without copyright. Visitors to the Art Institute’s website also can experience enhanced viewing for each image by zooming in on the paintings, drawings, and other artworks with more detail than before. The current image count is at 53,438, however the Art Institute explains that this number will continue to expand regularly. You can begin your dig into their vast store of artworks by visiting this online research tool.
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