Read about books we’ve recently found or sold …
London’s Great Wheel – the one built in 1894…
Who even knew that London had a Great Wheel back then? This Wheel was built in 1894-5 as part of the Empire of India Exhibition. It was 308 feet high and continued giving people a bird’s-eye-view of that part of London until 1906. The image, a photogravure, is...
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A Pioneering Northwest Woman…
A remarkable Northwest pioneer, Phoebe Goodell Judson (1831-1936), along with her husband Holden, founded (and named) the town of Lynden in northwest Washington. In 1886 she started Northwest Normal School, which became Western Washington University. Her 1925 book, A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home, was written from entries in the diary she kept upon leaving Canada for the Northwest in 1853.
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A Japanese photographer in a frontier Northwest town…
Frank (Sakae) Matsura, the Northwest photographer featured in this book by JoAnn Roe, had a fascinating, but somewhat mysterious life. His father and uncle were samurai, and he was descended from the 52nd emperor of Japan. Matsura (1873-1913) left Japan in the early 1900s, arriving in Washington State’s Okanogan country in 1903 living first in Conconully and then in Okanogan. He worked…
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An early 1900s watercolor caricature of a “budmash”
Budmash is a Hindi term for a notorious character – a bad dude. This wonderfully ferocious-looking watercolor painting was done by George E. Macleod (1851-1910) and signed “G.E.M.” Macleod was a civil service commissioner in Oudh and Assam from 1870-1890s. The painting is one of several by Macleod, who was clearly talented, and are part of an archive of correspondence, photographs and caricatures…
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British colonials at play in 1930s India
I love looking at old images – especially of India. This particular image comes from a large album from the 1930s that features scores of fascinating photographs of unnamed British colonials doing what British colonials did in those days – vale hunting, pig-sticking, show jumping, hunting astride elephants, and attending formal dinners and lawn parties. The album was lovingly kept and many…
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