The point at which a star reaches its highest position in the sky, and the line by which all journeys are measured.
Descrittione dell'Isola Taprobana
A Venetian copperplate map of an island Europe argued over for two thousand years: Taprobana, the dream-version of Sri Lanka, engraved by Girolamo Porro for Porcacchi's island atlas, c.1590.
A Venetian copperplate map of an island Europe argued over for two thousand years: Taprobana, the dream-version of Sri Lanka, engraved by Girolamo Porro for Porcacchi's island atlas, c.1590.
Every object is a star, placed in the year it was made.
Gold stars belong to the Island thread. A ringed star is still being researched. The constellations are the narratives: stories drawn between objects across the years.
The Year 1927
One year surfaces three times across the shelf: a school prize in July, a Christmas inscription, and a slide rule's production run.
Twelve constellations
Each narrative connects objects acquired separately into a single account: a year, a maker, a war, a way of seeing.
Picturing Place: Four Centuries of Looking
From an engraved guess at Taprobana to albumen prints of Bremen to pen-and-ink England: three technologies for taking a place home.
The England Trilogy, Complete
Sydney R. Jones's three-volume pen-and-ink survey of England, complete: South (1948), West (1950), East (1954).
The Broster Shelf: Jacobites Between the Wars
Three interwar Heinemann hardbacks of D. K. Broster: novels of honourable defeat, read by the generation that survived the trenches.
Russia in Translation
Four volumes, three translators: how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky crossed into English, from wartime reprint to mail-order classics.
The Analogue Toolkit
Calculate, write, forecast, see: four machines of the pre-electronic everyday, each one now an app on a phone.
Other People's Hands
Inscriptions, prize labels, plaques and stamps: seven objects whose previous owners left their names behind.
Two Christmases
Two books given at Christmas, 1918 and 1927. Gift inscriptions as time stamps on what a decade hoped for.
The Camera and the Album
Bremen 1891 and England 1954: from buying photographs made by professionals to taking your own.
Pocket Gilt: Books Made to Be Carried
A Georgian prayer book and an Edwardian pocket Byron, eighty years apart, solving the same problem: beauty that fits in a pocket.
Literature for the Parlour
How the masterpiece came down off the luxury shelf and into ordinary front rooms: Shakespeare by the third of a million, a pocket Byron, mail-order Dostoevsky, and one poet nobody bought.
The Year 1927
One year surfaces three times across the shelf: a school prize in July, a Christmas inscription, and a slide rule's production run.
Books in Wartime
A 1918 gift inscription, a Swiss typewriter built 1939–1945, and War and Peace reprinted in 1943: war as it appears in margins, dates, and paper.
The Island
Sri Lanka across every century: ancient and Kandyan, colonial Ceylon, independence, and after. Maps, photographs, documents, autographs, books, and objects that witnessed the island's story.
← Walk the Island threadThe Instruments of Progress
Small, touchable objects that mark how mankind learned to measure, record, calculate, and see: slide rules, barometers, typewriters, cameras, chronometers, and the books that carried ideas.
Walk the Instruments thread →