An orange and white cat makes biscuits on the throat of a woman wearing a pink teeshirt
After hiding for a day or so, Mishmish has decided that the cat sitter is worthy of Throat Biscuits™ This is her highest and rarest endorsement!
A manuscript receipt, reading "The Town of Boston to Thomas Jefferson Dr To cleaning 28 windows at the Boylston School, at 17 cents per window 4.76 allowed" Source: Boston Town Records, Loose Papers, May-June 1819, Special Collections, Boston Public Library
As the semiquincentennial of the Revolution ramps up, I find myself more interested in the African American Thomas Jefferson who cleaned windows for the town of Boston in the 1810s, than the Thomas Jefferson of Monticello who enslaved African Americans to do this sort of work for him for free 🗃️
Garber’s spotty paws are perfect!
Same. Failed every O Level and left school at 16. Some years of very non-traditional chaos. A levels at night school. Took a first, then Oxford and Harvard. Now a professor. Not everyone's trajectory looks, or needs to look, the same.
Yikes!
I hope you get to your destination soon!
Easily possibly the worst airport I have ever transited through. Never made a connection on time there; never had an originating flight from there not get cancelled, or delayed, or changed from one end of the airport to the other. I go out of my way to avoid that place.
Awww. I almost overslept my alarm this morning, because I'm used to Tulip licking my face to wake me up. I hope your travels go well, Paul!
That’s a great one!
My orange and white cat, Mishmish, sits on a yellow legal pad
My black retriever mix, Tulip, standing on her hind legs with her paws on the window sill. She looks thoughtful.
Research trips are incredible fun, but man do I miss my critters when I’m away from home 🥲
#uglydogs
Thanks! I blocked them all!
1819 bill tendered by Nathaniel Bell for ringing bells
1818 appointment of Thomas Clark as Town Clerk
When you find a bell ringer named Nathaniel Bell, and a Town Clerk named Thomas Clark in one folder of papers, you start to suspect that there may be something to nominative determinism after all! 🗃️
Splat
How your email finds me
I gave a talk that touched (pun intended) on this topic @amantiquarian.bsky.social in 2015. Link below. Happy to share citations also:
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8npm2...
Oh, Piper! My last girl was a flattie, and I love them so much! 🖤
Safe travels!
Good girl, Pepper!
It’s all at the Massachusetts Archives now. Mind blowing that it spent so long at Framingham, though!
Two gothic / sentimental steel engravings with ‘Minutes of the Committee of the Court of Sessions & Boston Selectmen about building new prison & c in Boston’ handwritten above it.
Two gothic / sentimental steel engravings with ‘Minutes of the Committee of the Court of Sessions & Boston Selectmen about building new prison & c in Boston’ handwritten above it.
When Boston set out to build a new prison in 1820, the prison committee’s manuscript minutes were bound in scrap paper that featured engravings from what appears to be a gothic novel, and I simply cannot get over how cool this is 🗃️
YOU’RE RIGHT. SORRY FOR MAKING LIGHT OF IDENTITY THEFT. SORRY FOR SHOUTING ALSO.
My Secret Favorite! Sweet CBGB!
Voods' Moods
May you get to dig in soon, Sarah!
That’s some top notch detective work there!
May you be gruntled soon!
For the curious, the poem turns out Robert Bland's translation of Leonidas of Tarentum from Bland and Thomas Merivale's 1806 volume, Translations, Chiefly from the Greek Anthology
Only if Jocelyn brings the beer!
Never forget Cricket.
