Patrick Leary
@patrickleary
Historian, esp. 19c press, talk, book history. Author “Googling the Victorians,” “Punch Brotherhood,” etc. Co-founder SHARP, mgr VICTORIA. Fond of Old Time Radio, 60s Top 40, tennis, London. Liberal Texan in self-imposed Midwest exile. FRHistS
Who can forget this scene from The Hound of the Baskervilles? I can, and did. With thanks to the amazing @arkhamlibrarian.bsky.social for another pulp take on a Victorian classic!
So happy to be in Dublin for this year’s @rs4vp.org meeting. Here posing with Sir Isaac amid the empty shelving of the soon to be renovated Old Library…and searching in vain for someone to explain to me why the letter J is missing from all the shelves. #RSVP2026
I’m more or less particular about my particulates, and these have been particularly unwelcome.
A curious bookshop find: a 1915 edition of Alice in Wonderland with a promotional tie-in to the silent movie starring Viola Savoy. It’s illustrated with stills from the film.
Jane Eyre reimagined in Classics Illustrated #39 (1947), cover by Harley Griffiths. There's just something about these 1940s-50s pulp and comic-book remediations of 19th-c. texts...
Here is @bushraamiwala.bsky.social firing up the crowd at Wilmette’s No Kings rally. #nokings #nokingswilmette
The humbug list is so interesting! The Claimant had been released from prison that same year, so perhaps the press's rehashing of the case helped to boost his numbers in the poll. Wilde had appeared in the center of Frith's RA painting in 1883: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
News of the imminent demise of the mass market paperback has sent my thoughts back to some of the more luridly packaged “classics” of my youth.
That’s so interesting. It reminds me of the way William Heinemann, in the following century, would sometimes include an extra spine label tipped in at the back for when the original one wore off. Here’s a copy of Max Berbohm’s AND EVEN NOW with what booksellers call the “spare label.”
That's so interesting. Of course he had been in the public eye for well over 20 years at that point, and the frequent subject of the kind of celebrity interviews ("authors at home" etc.) that had become all the rage. Still, the difference from all the other prominent journalists is surprising.
Thanks for this. I’m reminded that even in older movies glasses could be important signifiers. Mary (Donna Reed) doesn’t need glasses in Bedford Falls, but in the dystopian world of Pottersville she’s consigned to a bespectacled life as the old maid librarian.
The wonderful scholar Brian Maidment, who died last year, wrote a very shrewd analysis of this caricature in his _Comedy, Caricature, and the Social Order, 1820-1850_, as well as in his definitive biography of Robert Seymour, the artist. Brian also chose it for the cover--it's irresistible.
When I heard Lydia give a talk about this at the 25th anniversary NAVSA conference in Bloomington a couple of years ago, I'd just been reading Morley's life of Richard Cobden, and this passage struck me as a good example of personal grief translated into political activism.
Although Shirley Brooks of the Punch staff was a Tory he admired Mill's stance on female suffrage, and at Brooks's suggestion John Tenniel drew this mildly satiricial cartoon that appeared in the number for 30 March 1867. babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc...
British newspapers of the period didn't carry front-page headlines in the modern sense, but individual articles did often have upper-case headings, and a quick search of the British Newspaper Archive turns up a lot of headings like this one from the Edinburgh Evening News of 2 June 1884
I saw this sign today at a mall in Skokie, Illinois, listing prohibited behaviors. All seemed more or less OK til I got to #9: “Free speech activity not authorized in advance.” Shove it, Westfield Old Orchard. We won’t be asking your permission for “free speech activity.”
Favorite sign at Wilmette, Illinois No Kings rally today: “If Kamala had won we’d all be at brunch right now.”
Wilmette, Illinois on No Kings day — a righteously angry but joyful crowd of America-lovers.