Written to accompany an exhibition at the Met in New York (which we saw) and later at the Wallace Collection, London and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in California. Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts by Wolf Burchard. I don’t entirely share Langrish’s opinions about favourite characters or passages, but am glad that she too admires Pauline Baynes’s illustrations. She notes, for example, something that had never occurred to me, that it was in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, not in The Last Battle, that Lewis first dismisses Susan, described as ‘the pretty one of the family’, ‘no good at school work (though otherwise very old for her age)’ (‘a euphemism for sexual precocity’). Now an adult, she sees different things in the stories than she did as a child, including biblical passages and other literature which may have inspired Lewis’s writing, and she has different attitudes to the books while remembering how she felt once upon a time. Fantasy author Langrish reminisces about her first readings of C.S. (A shorter, mainly photographic account specifically of saving the National Gallery’s collections is The National Gallery in Wartime by Suzanne Bosman, 2008.)įrom Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with My Nine Year-Old Self by Katherine Langrish. Such people were ‘unlikely wartime heroes’ in saving Britain’s national treasures, because of their knowledge and talents but were they unlikely? or, in fact, the most likely? If not these experts, dedicated and on the spot, who else would have done the job? Or is Shenton making a distinction between those who fought in battle (‘wartime’) and those who did not? In any case, it does these accomplished men and women no honour to depict them as somehow bizarre in their tastes, mannerisms, or appearance.
![house text art copy and paste house text art copy and paste](https://legislator-photos.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/small/MIL000425.jpg)
‘Elegant, patrician’ Kenneth Clark of the National Gallery, for example, is a particular target the important forensic scientist Ian Rawlins is described as ‘immensely tall – well over six foot four – bespectacled, with pale skin, a greasy auburn comb-over, and unfeasibly long fingers’ Martin Davies, Assistant Keeper of the National Gallery under Clark, nicknamed ‘Dry Martini’, is said to have ‘cut a fastidious, shy, unworldly figure as he walked through the West End, carrying at all times a string bag full of library books and oranges’. It is a happier story than Peiss’s in Information Hunters, but Shenton allows personal biases to colour her account. Museum and library authorities had the foresight to plan for evacuations before conflict with Hitler began, though not everyone carried through with the same efficiency, there was competition for suitable space, and some officials dragged their feet or withheld the necessary funds. The nation in question is Britain, and Shenton includes libraries with the wartime efforts to move art collections out of harm’s way. National Treasures: Saving the Nation’s Art in World War II by Caroline Shenton. A related book on my shelves which I have not yet got to is The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance by Anders Rydell (2015). There were many competing interests among libraries and agencies, fraudulent claims, thefts, and subterfuge, amidst widespread destruction. Peiss does not omit discussion of the morality of such activities, or of fraught efforts to restore materials to the owners (if they survived) from whom they were stolen. Later these initiatives grew into programs such as the T-forces, which swept into Europe behind advancing Allied armies to sweep up not only documents to aid intelligence and support the prosecution of war criminals, but even entire libraries, seen by some as spoils of war. Peiss tells a story, sometimes at exhausting length, first of efforts, before the United States was formally at war, by American libraries to obtain materials from overseas when their usual sources were cut off or hampered, and by American intelligence to gather foreign publications with information useful in the coming conflict. Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe by Kathy Peiss.
![house text art copy and paste house text art copy and paste](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2b/68/60/2b6860aebe61a2ec1ce69b247d5fb722.jpg)
I used to collect Carol’s book publications and ephemera. – which I’ve long admired alongside her decorative paste papers. A slight but attractive pamphlet highlighting Easthampton, Massachusetts printer Carol Blinn’s (Warwick Press) jobbing work – business cards, invitations, etc.
![house text art copy and paste house text art copy and paste](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-V6-rLdTvlnU/UjsjbTckwVI/AAAAAAAABSY/AeBk-ptBsoo/s1600/Home-Sweet-Home-Text-Art.jpg)
![house text art copy and paste house text art copy and paste](https://legislator-photos.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/small/MEL000321.jpg)
Blinn delivered by Michael Russem at the December 2014 meeting of The Society of Printers’.