Highlights from the Collection (part 8)

part of an ongoing series, from my storage to your screen.

Since I haven't gone anywhere this summer, chained as I am to my computer, I thought I'd feature this little tourist booklet of photographs I picked up recently. A souvenir from someone's vacation, sometime in the 1940s, it shows the Cote d'Azur surely not as they experienced it, but as they wanted to remember it being.

Smaller than a business card, I think it was the size, at a diminutive 2 x 3", that clinched the sale of these "photos-bijoux." Attractively hand tinted, the b/w images are actually quite sharp (see detail, above).

Details of note:
• eccentric Deco-ish lettering
• scalloped edging (a phenomenon which I've queried before, if anyone has any info to share)
• gold edge-finishing, an unexpectedly luxe touch
• a delicate glasseine fly sheet, difficult to see in the third row, left

Now if we could only go enjoy a Gauloise and glass of Kina Lillet over ice.

Homo repugnans*

A few weeks ago I visited the Natural History Museum. It struck me, as we sauntered past the dioramas, that most representations of "Early Man" I have ever seen (Geico cavemen aside) are of these fright-wigged, snaggle-toothed, worried-looking creatures. They've usually got brambles and straw matted into their wild, frazzle mop and often sport a dyspeptic expression. This seems a bit odd considering many animals are fastidious about cleaning themselves. Cats will lick and smooth their coats, chimps will sit and pick lice off one another and appear to have quite a nice, happy time of it. Doesn't it stand to reason that man would be like the rest of the animal kingdom and groom himself? Perhaps even devise a way to get that cr*p out of his hair?

* I made that up

image: I got this on Flickr and regret that I've forgotten whose it was...