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 a go at trying some of the recipes. I doubt Maia realised that her casual remarks would…
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 photographs, manuscripts, rare books and muniments better. Next week we’ll…
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 actually finish the job. Any collodion photographer of the Victorian or modern age…
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 in 1824 entitled Papyro-plastics, or the art of modelling in paper, translated…
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 and 16th century. I’ve grabbed St Andrews’ copy of A most excellent…
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 younger cousin Fanny Price. She cannot list the principal rivers in…
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 I decided to look through the collections and…
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 library and archive to the University in 1943, the…
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 “Scurvy-grass Ale” found in an early 19th century book from our…
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 take a backward glance at the craft of photography to when…