She’s grown quite a bit since I took this pic, but nearly all my free time in the last few months has been spent being exhausted by our newest family member, Cadence.
She’s such a handful! Thankfully she’s also the very best girl.
She’s grown quite a bit since I took this pic, but nearly all my free time in the last few months has been spent being exhausted by our newest family member, Cadence.
She’s such a handful! Thankfully she’s also the very best girl.
On a recent visit to the Jefferson Memorial in DC, I picked up a magnet set. I didn’t look at it too closely in the store, but once we got back to the hotel, I noticed something.
Since this is a Washington-themed souvenir, you might expect those backgrounds to be pulled from the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. Or maybe some old patriotic novel. But here’s a closer look:
The text in the bottom left is the title page of Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Hammer of Witches, which is a 15th-century book about, among other things, how to properly torture confessions out of suspected witches. Other bits of recognizable text are from Daemonologie by King James I, Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, a pamphlet about the witches of Warboys, and a story about an alleged witch who was shot by parliamentary soldiers during the English Civil War.
Apparently some designer had a fun day at work while making these.
Spotted during a recent visit to the NC Museum of Art:
I love the way that the artist, Carolus-Duran, perfectly captured the expression of polite boredom that suggests that whatever he was talking to his wife about while painting her was far less interesting than the book in her hands.
Does anyone really care about introduction posts? I’m not sure, which means I’ll make this quick.
The previous incarnation of this blog started in 2011, but the platform I used for it isn’t a good match these days. So here’s a new version! A (hopefully) less annoying to administer version!
I won’t be importing all of my previous content, but I will repost edited versions of some of it over the next few months (I’ll tag those things “repost” as a way to keep track). So if you ended up here by way of a broken link, try using the built-in search on this page! It might send you through to what you were looking for.