After the overwhelming interest in all of my artifacts from my recent post in “What’s in the mail?”, I have decided to dedicate an entire topic to showcase them.
Despite the title, I encourage anyone to post their collections or findings here!
History and the humanities are fascinations of mine. As such, I have hundreds of articles in my collection that I keep under museum conditions in my study.
Pictured below is my twice-great uncle. Some time 100 years ago someone defaced this photo by scrawling a moustache and sideburns on it using a pencil.
The first image is how the original photo looks. The second image is me priming the affected area. The third is me hand restoring the photo. I hadn’t done restorative work like this before, but I happen to be a professional artist so I was inadvertently qualified to fix this.
Thanks for looking, and I look forward to seeing your things!
“Der Weltbrand” is a Weimar era propagandistic book that fashions itself to be a retelling of events of The Great War. It is a false account of The Great War. It is written as if the war was something that befell Germans, and not something that was a result of German aggression. The book is filled with charcoal sketches of German soldiers in pitiful states. Dead or dying, bandaged and bruised.
It is a liar’s limp.
As such I will not provide any scans of its pages.
I have no other items Conrad sent, nor do I know the name of his child.
you might like/be interested in an author named wg sebald, @HyggeState . he would trawl flea markets and such for antique photos and make them key features of his novels, which were a strange blend of travelogue, history, fiction, and biography. some of the photos were to be taken at face value, like those of famous authors or herring fisheries. other photos he would pass off as himself as a child, or perhaps the family of someone in the book, when in truth they were strangers he’d found by chance. it creates an unstable, melancholy feeling that pervades all of his works.
he’s had a few imitators follow in his wake, but to my knowledge he was the first to intersect antiques and art/literature in this way, or at least the first to do it exceptionally well.
I’m a life long antiques collector. I go to estate sales a couple times a month and thrift stores even more frequently. Here’s either a Daguerreotype or ambrotype. I don’t know enough to tell
With only a day to spare for this to be topical, here is a stamp from the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. It depicts the official poster of the event, painted by Olle Hjortzberg.
This printing is in German.
The 1916 Olympics never happened. They were scheduled to be held in Berlin.
I’ve not the time for transcriptions today as I’m preoccupied in writing my own book as well as assembling an art studio. The romantic thing to do would be to keep the secrets anyway.
Here are a few Valentines in my collection from the turn of last century.
