Sarah Bull
@sarahebull
English professor, book historian. 19th C, mainly. I wrote Selling Sexual Knowledge (CUP, 2025). Now working on MANUFACTURING LITERATURE and a few smaller projects.
I'm sort of intrigued by the signalling effort going on re: the print editions and the "stockists" page — are they supposed to imply that the mag is a kind of Apartamento for AI sophisticates (funded by Microsoft, lol), or just reinforce its 'humanist' branding?
@findmypast.bsky.social has changed the British Newspaper Archive platform. I can't say I'm thrilled about this. It now seems harder to manipulate the search (it assumes that you're an amateur genealogist), you have to peer at the scan through a big window, and you can't see the name/date/page +
When a legal writing convention meets people with way too much identity baggage to fit comfortably into a single sentence (these are on the same page of The London Gazette, 03 June 1859, 2216!)
The sky isn't an eerie yellow today, but I went outside just briefly and my eyes are stinging from the smoke. (Image of an orange sun obscured by clouds of smoke — posted by the Sydenham Current, but exactly what the sun looked like in Toronto yesterday)
YES! Heather, this is so great and so beautifully articulates the difference between presenting research in a beautiful way and offering it in a way that makes it possible for others to access and use it (I could feel my own frustration at the many "but the data is locked away!" parts).
The UK National Archives has a series of eight boxes of documents about ‘smuggling’ in the 1840s and 1850s. It turns out that all of the documents concern THE SAME watch-smuggling ring, and include this helpful diagram:
Ok, it's not a bibliography of cows, but there is a bibliography of books about cats, 1858-1922! www.biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/colle...
20th and 21st century works on Internet Archive that share a title with a Victorian penny blood: a list (made possible by the wonderful site Price One Penny! www.priceonepenny.info/database/vie...) 1. The Snake in the Grass
Ahaha, mee too. The world needs a bibliographical equivalent to collections of paintings like:
Happily recovering from the Thinking Through Printing symposium this at the University of Toronto. Highlights for me included @ryancordell.org's awesome keynote on skeuomorphism, meeting so many new people +longtime internet friends @transbookhistory.bsky.social + @colleenlovesbks.bsky.social in +
Oh, to have the confidence of the man who told me this week that a course about books, writers, readers and publishers could not possibly be a book history course.
*nods in agreement, looks at this section of an article I'm re-reading, sighs* (from Edelstein, Dan, Robert Morrissey, and Glenn Roe. "To Quote or not to Quote: Citation Strategies in the "Encyclopédie"." Journal of the History of Ideas 74, no. 2 (2013): 213-236.)
William Heath (1820) and Robert Seymour (1828). Came across the Heath print by chance the other day — similarities in the composition are kind of striking 🤔 Adding more reading on prints to my already over-ambitious summer reading list...
Going to a Canadian university practically always means spending a lot of time in brutalist buildings and it's really made me a fan! Simon Fraser University!