Name: Poblamiento del Continente Americano
ISBN: 978-9929-687-90-5

Architecture · Books · Saint Petersburg

Let more diverse tastes be joined together

Let more diverse tastes be joined together. Let the same street see rising side by side the gloomily Gothic, the Eastern laden with lavish ornament, the colossal Egyptian, and the Greek, imbued with harmonious proportion... Let houses as seldom as possible merge into one even, monotonous wall... Gogol on eclecticism,

NB! · Aristocracy · Archive · Books · Monarchies

"No one doubted that the Emperor would now find himself honest and devoted men": from the memoirs of Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna on the murder of Rasputin

An elderly man in a dark shirt sits at a table with his hands folded, a book in front of him and a framed mirror behind.

Books · Society · People

Alexander Zinoviev on the catastrophe that has already happened

Do not wait for catastrophe. It has already happened. Alexander Zinoviev (1922-2006)

Books · Pop Culture

First edition of Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” from 1937 found in Bristol and sold for £43,000

The first edition of Tolkien's The Hobbit, published in 1937, was found without its dust jacket on a shelf in a house in Bristol and sold at auction for £43,000. It is one of 1,500 original copies, of which only a few hundred survive. The book

NB! · Books · Science · People

In his "Essays on Optimism", Academician Metchnikoff wrote that Europeans do not enjoy long lives, only long old age

Drawing of a bearded man in a frock coat holding a hat by a door with signs “Устрицы” and “Homards”, a waiter standing beside him.

Books · Society

N. A. Nekrasov in his poem “Sovremenniki” addresses the reader about the sons of his age

I took a book, risen from my sleep, And read in it: "There have been worse times, But none more base" I flung the book far from me. Can it be that you and I Are sons of such an age, O friend and reader mine?.. Literal translation

Books · Heritage · Society

Why do libraries need rare book departments, and why must they have a special regime of access?

The answer is very simple: the preservation of holdings. Between 2022 and 2023, a number of European countries recorded cases of rare antiquarian editions disappearing from public and university libraries. Among the lost copies are first editions published in the lifetimes of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Shevchenko, Kruchenykh and other authors

Cinema · Books · Mores · Pop Culture

Angela Lansbury in the 1944 film adaptation and the origin of the term gaslighting

Gaslighting, the familiar term for a form of psychological abuse, takes its name from the play “Gas Light”. The role in the 1944 film adaptation brought Angela Lansbury her first fame and her first Oscar nomination. She played the maid Nancy, who helped Mr Gregory Anton drive his wife, played

Books · Observations

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world

Arthur Schopenhauer

An open old book with a handwritten inscription on the first page, signed Lev Tolstoy and dated 15 December 1902.

Books · Society · Humour

An entrepreneur offers collectible imitations of celebrity autographs

Counterfeiting in the antiquarian book market reaches a new level: outright forgeries presented as collectors' rarities, "manufactured" (!) in a single copy. At the end of the advertisement the entrepreneur adds: We have hundreds of digitised autographs of celebrities of the 19th to 21st centuries, and will produce

NB! · Books · Observations

What a fine word, and alas fallen out of circulation: “fellow-man”

Books · Monarchies · Heritage · Society

The Mirror of Law in the Offices of the Russian Empire and the Ritual of Its Consecration

In 1722 Peter I introduced a special mass-produced form of state insignia, the Zertsalo, which remained an obligatory attribute of the institutions of the Russian Empire until 1917. The symbol of the supremacy of law took the form of a wooden prism with three panels, crowned with the state