A Blog of Bosh

The Blog of Bosh has been online for exactly ten years today, the first post being dated 19 October 2000. It started on the pre-Google Blogspot and then moved to the present self-hosted Wordpress, which is powerful but requires frequent time-consuming maintenance.
Since I started the Edward Lear Diaries project, time has been scarce and I [...]

You can now read Ian Malcolm’s 1908 overview of Lear’s career (mostly from the point of view of the Baring family) in the Nonsense section of the site bookshelf:
Ian Malcolm, “Edward Lear.” The Cornhill Magazine, vol. 24, January 1908, pp. 25-36, as reprinted in The Living Age, vol. 256, no. 3319, 15 February [...]

Hunt Emerson, whose comic book adaptation of Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-cat” was mentioned in a previous post, has also posted a version of “The Jumblies,” executed as a private commission. Click on the images below to get larger ones.

Derek Smith of Lear Productions informs me that their documentary on Lear’s travels in Albania and Greece, which won the Arts Silver World Medal at the 2009 New York Festivals International Television Programming and Promotion Awards, will be shown again on Sky Arts in December on both high definition and standard definition channels (the links [...]

One of the most famous of Edward Lear’s self caricatures is certainly the one in which he portrays himself while looking straight into the eyes of a strange “bug,” which is itself gazing at him. I had never cared to check where the image came from, but today, while doing some reasearch for the Diaries [...]

My translation of the early episodes of Peter Newell’s Naps of Polly Sleepyhead will be in Italian libraries next week, and the publisher, orecchio acerbo, has a book trailer on YouTube:

This is going to be in the Little Big Books format, which I found suits Polly’s adventures very well.

Sunday Press has announced the availability of their new collection reprinting in full colour the whole run of  Gustave Verbeek’s The Upside-Downs of Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, the late Terrors of the Tiny Tads, as well the first complete collection of The Loony Lyrics of Lulu. While writing an introduction for this last [...]

Mr. Eden Phillpotts, [...] who lives in Devonshire and spends all his time in the beautiful English country, has written a book called “My Garden,” which will be published by the English Country Life. It is the thoughts of a literary man who is something of a gardener. There is no subject upon which Mr. [...]

The tragic consequences of being a missionary in Timbuctoo were the subject of one of the infrequent comic strips in Punch (22 February 1868, vol. 54, pp. 80-1).
The little poem around which the story turns is known in several different versions and has been variously attributed, but, as far as I know, no final agreement [...]

Moonshine, a magazine established in 1879, published the following parody of Edward Lear’s “Akond of Swat” on 1 January 1898 (p. 2); it was prompted by the leading dramatic critic of its age Clement Scott’s assertion that “it was practically impossible for any woman to remain on the stage and retain her womanly modesty,” a [...]