It all started with a scruffy manuscript recipe book from the 1830s and a few reckless comments about what fun it would be to have… Read More »52 Weeks of historical How-tos: reflections and visual index
We’ve sadly come to the end of our year long exploration of our collections. We’ve had tremendous fun getting to know obscure corners of our… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 52: A Special Scrapbook and Commonplace Book
Back in Week 15 of our Historical How-To’s, we created some collodion wet plate negatives. It is here that I must confess we did not… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 50: How to Varnish a Collodion Plate
For this week’s blog I thought I’d have a go at paper modelling, as we have in our Copyright Deposit Collection a little work published… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 46: How to Make Paper Models
For this week’s how-to, I thought I’d try some 16th century recipes from the first English translation of Europe’s most popular apothecary of the 15th… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, week 38: how to take a 16th century bath
There is a scene early in Mansfield Park (1814) where Maria and Julia Bertram, then aged thirteen and twelve, deplore the ignorance of their slightly… Read More »52 WEEKS OF HISTORICAL HOW-TO’S, WEEK 37: How to improve your mind …
Special Collections contains a number of publications and collected archives relating to the production and design of stained glass. As an aspiring stained glass artist… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 33: The Art of Stained Glass
For this week’s how-to post, I’ve taken some inspiration from one of our quirkiest collections, that of the Reverend John Beveridge (1857-1943). Beveridge gifted his… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 28: translating 17th century verse into Esperanto
This week’s How-to post gave an excuse for our two departmental home-brewers, Marc and Daryl, to stretch their boundaries to adapt a strange recipe for… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 26: Brewing Scurvy Grass Ale!
For this week’s Historical How-To post, we’re turning our eyes (and our lens!) to the 20th century for some inspirational portrait photography! We’re going to… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 14: Lighting a Portrait
From well before the time when William Henry Fox Talbot ventured into the realm of photographic experiments, the effects of silver nitrate, salts and light… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 3: Talbot’s Photogenic Drawing in The Pencil of Nature
We bought this recipe book at auction recently, and it arrived with no provenance information. However, from the names and places mentioned, I have worked… Read More »52 Weeks of Historical How-To’s, Week 2: Mrs Edwards’s cook book
