March 5, 2026
1890 Standard Diary This might seem kind of odd for someone who spends thousands of dollars on old paper each year (apologies, it’s tax time.). But […]
March 4, 2026
Edo-Period Waka Poetry Manuscripts Clouds gather and scatter across the mountain,yet the mountain remains. Winds rise and fall,yet the river keeps its course. So it is […]
March 4, 2026
Handwritten Musical Notation I’ll be honest, despite many offers from friends to offload their grandparents’ sheet music collections, I have never really had much interest in […]
March 4, 2026
A Workman’s Cypher Some books were meant to be read. Others were meant to be used. This workman’s cypher clearly falls into the second category. Long before […]
March 4, 2026
Pocket Books “A pocket book for your pocketbook!” Pocket-sized books have a long history, but they became especially popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth […]
March 3, 2026
Victorian Scrapbooks We tend to think of modern collage as something invented in the early twentieth century, pioneered by the Dadaists and by Picasso, pasting scraps […]
March 3, 2026
Japanese to English Notebook This mid-20th-century notebook belonged to a Japanese schoolboy learning to speak English. Its pages are filled with careful repetitions of the alphabet, […]
March 3, 2026
Lessons in Lettering The 1924 manual, Lessons in Lettering, is a specialized lettering course for architects. Much like the penmanship copybooks that I collect, these manuals […]
February 19, 2026
Shirtings Sample Book Beyond falling madly in love with it, I don’t know a whole lot about this sample book. I know that it’s a pre-WWII in-store […]