My cat absolutely doesn't give a sh*t

 

Winkle just turned 11

Happy Birthday.

// RIP Winkle 6/9/15 // 

Historical Dating

I'll just go ahead and admit it— I've found myself back on online dating again. Ho hum.

In a certain age bracket the selection of men seems to skew in 2 different directions: Old and old with a motorcycle. —Joke! —Actually, there are many at this age who go to great lengths to emphasize all the biking/skiing/rock climbing/surfing and general Fountain of Youth quaffing they do. Unfortunately, these dont work for me. I dread the inevitable big reveal when I have to admit that while, yes, I have been ON a bike, no, I do not actually bike. Or ski, or surf, etc. My intermittent exercise class attendance just wouldnt cut it with these silver Adonises so no, I guess I wont be checking you out on the slopes.

So, after scrolling and swiping my way through the bald and the beige, the Every Men, the superannuated skater boys, the dandies with unseemly numbers of profile pics, the leathery outer borough grandpas, each crag and jowl limned by the glare of a bathroom mirror selfie, I again find myself looking for solace in... the long dead or fictional. (I've been here before, and you can read more of the back story.) If you are well over a hundred I will probably find you devastatingly attractive. And I could create an OKChronos of the historical hotties I've collected over the years.

Without further preamble feast your eyes on sometime Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte’s Canoer of 1877. The nip of his waist! The snap of his brim! That grip! His steely intensity belied only by the cherubic indolence of his mouth. He could be in Williamsburg serving you your next Absinthe cocktail, and he could rock my boat anytime.

attention art directors, part 2

Someone I met recently happened to show me a Super 8 movie he made with a few friends in 6th grade, about 1977. Based loosely on Baretta, the cop show with Robert Blake, his film had fight scenes, chase sequences, and even a panning shot as characters ran down the street. (It did not however, have a cockatoo.) It was kid-acted, -shot and -directed with surprising skill, with adult input on editing and driving the getaway car. In winning grade school fashion the production was called Barfetta and Eric hand lettered his title cards in puffy, balloon type. I'm not sure why I was so smitten with this little opus but I'm sure it has something to do with the iconic low-tech image quality and the 1970s color. (It made me think of this old post about footage of cars driving away from Woodstock.) I could see each of these frames as a Gerhard Richter painting.

Packing

Random finds during packing. Above, business card from a family trip.
Below, health votive from Greece.

Small 1920 notebook with maps, 26th Street Flea Market

matchbooks, 26th Street Flea Market

 

photo, Maine.

UPDATED: I am moving. This means everything comes off the walls and out of drawers and off the shelves—it's taken me a while to absorb the enormity of that. There is just so much stuff. I stop and think—well everything came in the door so everything can make it out. But much of this accumulation was just that-- a steady accrual, creeping in quietly, piece by piece. I've looked at this move as an opportunity to deaccession some things from The Collection: shells, old bottles, ceramics, mudlarking detritus, some wooden what-nots, a large cow head sign... But each shedding is a trial, almost every one produces a twinge of regret along with a brief little remembrance of where and when I acquired the item. The goal was to get rid of 1/4 of my flea market cache. It has been more like 1/10. Perhaps I will do further editing on unpacking.//

The passion for accumulation is upon us. We make “collections,” we fill our rooms, our walls, our tables, our desks, with things, things, things.

Many people never pass out of this phase. They never see a flower without wanting to pick it and put it in a vase, they never enjoy a book without wanting to own it, nor a picture without wanting to hang it on their walls. ... Their houses are filled with an undigested mass of things, like the terminal moraine where a glacier dumps at length everything it has picked up during its progress through the lands.

But to some of us a day comes when we begin to grow weary of things. We realize that we do not possess them; they possess us. Our books are a burden to us, our pictures have destroyed every restful wall-space, our china is a care, our photographs drive us mad ...We feel stifled with the sense of things, and our problem becomes, not how much we can accumulate, but how much we can do without. ... Such things as we cannot give away, and have not the courage to destroy, we stack in the garret, where they lie huddled in dim and dusty heaps, removed from our sight, to be sure, yet still faintly importunate...

—The Tyranny of Things, Elisabeth Morris (1917)

A friend noted:

Things. Recognized as once beloved. Now mostly just reminders of the excitement of their own discovery. Usually many layered time travel... to the time I found it, and further back, to the era the thing came from as well. So a perfect card of "Victory Hair Pins" takes me to both 1940 and 1987.

Recalling two eras was a wonderful observation. 

I still feel delighted by the specialness of the objects I have, but that delight is yoked to a sort of leaden duration of time in my possession. I feel I've "spent" the excitement of the piece by having it around so long. It needs to be discovered again. I have been putting things out in front of my house to be taken (in true Park Slope fashion) and have sold a couple things online. In a sense, by giving objects away or selling them I am reenergizing them— giving these finds a chance to delight anew.

Snow Days

blizzard 1922

c. 1830s. Why the women are out in snow in short sleeves is a mystery

"Diana in the Snow", 1915 Jessie Tarbox Beals
Diana was the statue atop the old Madison Square Garden which used to actually be on Madison Square

1914

c. 1940, Shorpy

Snow removal, 1908 NYC

"Snow man— Happy Days”, 1888

Snow shoeing, 1886

Christmas Cocktails and Greetings of the Season

The ABCs of B. de B.

You can see the entire collection of alphabet prints at our shop: www.b-de-b.com

The scrapbook is pretty large, about 15 x 17. Each linen page is pasted back and front with scraps of printed woodcuts and engravings hand-colored with watercolor paint.
The whole thing is dirty, creased and coming apart— but its fabulous.

Some of the other offerings in the scrapbook are on the more macabre side.

 

The Background:
At an Ephemera Fair a couple years ago, Doug, Sam, and I bought a large scrapbook of brightly hand-colored printed illustrations. Culled from a series of British children’s chapbooks, the scrapbook’s most recent image appears to date from about 1837 but many of the images are “cuts” created years, even decades before. All the clippings are affixed to pages of linen edged in red silk and are bound in a disintegrating cover marked “Juvenile Scrapbook” and “B. de B. Russell.” 

“B. de B. Russell”? Was that a business, place, or person?

We discovered what we had purchased in Connecticut in 2012 was a scrapbook created 175 years ago possibly to mark the birth of a little tyke with a preposterous name. It turned out Blois de Blois Russell was born at the very start of the Victorian era, on June 6, 1837, near Birmingham, England. He rowed crew for St. John’s College, Oxford, and, according to a sniffy email response from the Oxford registrar’s office, he was most certainly matriculated as a “commoner” (not nobility or even a “gentleman-commoner”). We also discovered he died under unrecorded circumstances in 1860 just before his 23 birthday. He seemed to have come from compromised stock as his brother and a sister both died very young as well. Whether being saddled with the name Blois de Blois Russell had any impact upon his health is unknown.
About chapbooks:
Stories, ballads, rhymes and popular tales of piety were passed down through the generations verbally. These oral transmissions started to be written down and printed in the 16th century as broadsides, leaflets and booklets called chapbooks. These were popular, cheap, and cheaply produced texts, typically from 8 to 32 pages and sold by itinerant peddlers called chapmen. “Chap” is etymologically related to an old (Middle?) English word for “trade” (see place name Cheapside in London), and by extension, cheap. Chapbooks specifically for children became popular in the mid-1700s. Chaps were sold plain as printed or colored for an extra cent or two. Who did the coloring? Surely women and children. Pure speculation, but what a Dickensian scene: little waifs with their paint pots working in the dim glow of a lamp, so other, more cosseted children, like B. de B. Russell could enjoy their handiwork...
 
Now, B. de B. and the Chapbook Alphabet Print Series

We were inspired to create prints with what we found in the album’s pages— mixing letters and images for this series of chapbook alphabet prints. So our first offering is generally agreeable subject matter, just slightly off. Next we'd like to plumb the more macabre offerings-- we welcome any thoughts on the matter.

“B. de B.” wasn't our first choice of names—we went through several—but kept coming back to the euphonious, if odd, B. de B. It had become shorthand for the project, and the name stuck. Now, B. de B. has become a growing collection of historically-based designs that rescues ephemera from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and re-imagines it for the twenty-first.

See us at www.b-de-b.com