Hi, Fives!
Because this was a day when I was going wibble and trying to remember which of my multitasks I was supposed to be doing next at around 3 pm; and the day didn't stop there, just before I was due to go off duty as on-call archivist I got called down to show someone how to use the microfilm reader (which the supervisor is supposed to do), and it was not even one of the many problems we are having with the machine, just swapping over from fiche holder to reel carriage and making sure film was inserted the right way round, moan, bitch, fume)....
So here are 4 fives:
From
jonquil
Five cool facts you've stumbled over in the archive while researching something else
1. I'd always thought of Letitia Fairfield (Rebecca West's doctor sister, who also had a degree in law) as a fairly austere type - she never married and became a public health administrator - but among her papers are dance programmes with those little pencils on cords, from her days at medical school. (And she was 90 or so when she died, and had kept them.)
2. I am still loving the idea of early C18th city magnates having fondu parties - or at least, finding a recipe for fromage fondue in an early C18th banker's wife's recipe book.
3. Who cannot love a marginal pointer in a medieval manuscript that is not the usual hand symbol, but a little willy?
4. That way back in the 1920s there was an actual anti-evolution organisation in the UK, which as far as I know has since disappeared, badgering the Board of Education about the teaching of godless darwinism in schools and offering an alternative biology syllabus.
5. Mutual fannishness abounding between K Mansfield and H G Wells, and ditto Edith Sitwell.
From
kore
Favourite five 'forgotten' female historians/theorists/writers/&c
Wot only 5?
1. Well, I have to include Stella Browne, don't I?
2. Mary Ellmann, whose Thinking About Women is still damn good reading (even if she is rather harsh about my darling Dame Rebecca).
3. Ruth Herschberger, whose Adam's Rib (1948) is still fresh and funny and codslaps whatever the 1948 equivalent of evolutionary psychologists was.
4. A Maude Royden.
5. Winifred Holtby, whose novels are pretty well known and reprinted, but I don't think anyone has ever reissued her incisive 1934 Woman and a Changing Civilisation.
From
ann1962
Five favorite flowers?
1. Freesias, especially for their scent.
2. Bluebells, in swathes in woodlands.
3. Cherry blossom suddenly burgeoning on bleak urban trees.
4. Sunflowers peering over garden fences or walls.
5. The first crocuses.
From
owlfish
Five favorite gadgets
I'm not sure that I go in much for gadgets, or what might be classified under that heading: -
1. Does my food processor count?
2. iPod.
3. Mobile broadband dongle.
4. Destapler (an archivist's essential).
5. Can I count my shiny (literally) new netbook? which I want to hug and pet and call something a bit more gender-neutral than George, and which I am already buying presents such as snazzy carrycases for.
***
And just so this is not all just me-me-meeeeeee:
A not very good piece on Arthur Ransome. Did he not have space, or did he not do his research, or did he not actually gather that the children upon whom the Swallows and Amazons were based were more interesting in unexpected ways than one might suppose: obit of Taqui and a rather thin Wikipedia entry on Roger Altounyan (who gets into the ODNB, but you need a subscription to access).
Edward Wilson's handwritten account of the 1911 Antarctic journey up for sale:
Wilson was with Scott at the south pole in 1912, only to find Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. When the frozen corpses of the British explorers were found in November, Scott's arm was around Wilson.
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