Or the thousandth post, so here’s a capital M from the Gothic alphabet of Marie de Bourgogne, circa 1480. Taken from Fantastic Alphabets (L’Aventurine, Paris, 1995).
Category: {miscellaneous}
Miscellaneous
Earthquake hits much of England
Earthquake hits much of England
| Biggest for 25 years.
02008
Children’s toys for Christmas, 1896
An ad from The Queen magazine, November 28th, 1896, showing what lucky children in London and elsewhere might expect to receive for Christmas. (Close-ups follow below.) Those children would have needed wealthy parents since many of these toys cost half a week’s pay or more for the average worker. Scanned from Victorian Advertisements (1968) by Leonard de Vries.
A note about the prices: 10/6 means “ten and six” or 10 shillings (10s) and sixpence (6d). Before decimalisation in 1971 there were 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. 1 shilling is the equivalent of 5 pence in today’s currency.
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Okay, we’re back at last. There’s still a few things to sort out due to encoding issues that resulted from the database crossover–there may be stray ???s here and there for a while–but I’ll attend to those as I go along. I’ve never tried moving a database from one server to another before so I’m surprised it went as well as it did.
My apologies again to people who visited during the past week only to find a holding page. The final result of all the grief is that I’m now paying less for more and (I hope) a better service. I haven’t had a chance to fully test things yet but I think the new server is also faster than the older one, so that’s good for everybody.