WriteAntiques

Time was when the must-have Christmas present for children and adults alike was a magical book like the ones illustrated here. In their own way, they were the Victorian equivalent of the Game Boy — and they didn’t need batteries. They are mechanical or metamorphic books, designed to be interactive, their pages changing as the story develops, all at the whim of the reader.
Today’s collectors call them “pop-up books”, a catch-all term that covers a multitude of elaborate and innovative three-dimensional and other designs that remain as captivating today as they were a hundred years ago.
Actually, mechanical books have a long history.

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There’s no shortage of choice: Barbie and Sindy, My Little Pony and the Brownies continue to have mass appeal for the girls, while us boys go for Thunderbirds, Spiderman and relative newcomer Bob the Builder.
All are on sale this Christmas and so it was –admittedly with a different cast of characters – since the 1820s, [...]

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A newly-released website, www.davincinotebooks.com makes available the entire content of Leonardo da Vinci’s 14th century notes. Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and as impressive and innovative as Leonardo’s artistic work are his studies in science and engineering, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and [...]

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by Christopher Proudlove©Español | Deutsche | Français | Italiano | Português

I’m a Lord of the Rings fan myself, so entreaties to join the family at the cinema to watch The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe over the holiday break fell on deaf ears. It sounds like it was my loss: the film received rave [...]

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