A Blog of Bosh

A suitably obscure rendition of an Edward Lear poem (”Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly“) by Dudley Moore from the needlessly destroyed archives of “Not Only… But Also“.

This is clearly an amateurish home production of Edward Lear’s “The Pobble Who Has No Toes;” the image is quite dark and at times this makes it difficult to understand what’s going on.

The music for this video was first published in Ken Nordine’s CD A Transparent Mask (Asphodel ASP 2004, 2001): “The Akond of Swat” is one of Edward Lear’s Indian poems.

More Nordine on YouTube.

From YouTube, a short animated film by Doug Wilson, illustrating Edward Lear’s poem “The Two Old Bachelors.” This traditional animation movie was produced at the University Of Central Lancashire for his 3rd year degree and it was shown at the Flip Animation Festival in Wolverhamptin in October 2006.

A quick search revealed several other clips I’ll [...]

In 1909 Peter Newell filed an application for a patent on books with leaves “having designs thereon, and having corresponding portions of said designs cut away to provide sight openings.” The drawings used to illustrate it are sketches of the pictures published that same year under the title of Jungle-Jangle, a mild satire of Theodore [...]

A major contemporary art exhibition inspired by Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books entitled ‘Alice’s Wonderland’ is opening at “the gallery — Hornseys” on 14 April. Also on display “fine printers proofs from the original Sir John Tenniel wood blocks, as well as heliogravures by Salvador Dali.”

If you are interested in C.L. Dodgson’s mathematical works, you can read this article on the website of the Mathematical Association of America, which lists and links to several other essays on Carroll’s method for evaluating determinants.

The Moscow Times has an interesting story of the coming of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Russia: it seems the book had a very negative reception from the time of the first 1879 translation until 1967, when Soviet bureaucrats commissioned a translation after mistaking it for a Bulgarian book.

The whole of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (well, almost) in just 9 spectacular minutes, the original probably ran a bit longer as some scenes seem to be incomplete. On YouTube, in very low quality, but then I had never managed to see it:

For more information on the film and a some good comments see [...]

Peter Newell’s innovations in book technology, while mostly not very radical, induced him to patent the designs he created, below is the first page of his patent for the Slant Book:

In the specification he writes:

… I, Peter S. Newell of Leonia, in the State of New Jersey, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in [...]