A Blog of Bosh

Like Thackeray, Alfred Crowquill (pseudonym for Alfred Henry Forrester) has his place in the prehistory of comics thanks to an 1849 booklet entitled A Goodnatured Hint about California, a satire of the California gold rush. Besides publishing a successful series of illustrated fairy tales, Crowquill collaborated with several magazines of the time, Punch among them.
One [...]

In his recent book on the Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), David Kunzle also discusses British parallels to the Genevan inventor of comics; among them a special section is devoted to William Makepeace Thackeray, in which Kunzle states that the Picture Magazine (vol. III, 1894) published [...]

After the success of his two Topsy-Turvys, Peter Newell published A Shadow Book (New York: The Century Co., 1896) in which after looking at a picture, e.g. of an Arab leading a camel,

you turn the page and place it in front of a light source, so that the image you now see represents something else, [...]

In the early months of 1815 London was swept by reports of a pig-faced lady living in Manchester Square:
In the earlier part of this century, there was a kind of publication in vogue, somewhat resembling the more ancient broadside, but better printed, and adorned with a rather pretentious coloured engraving. One of those, published by [...]

A new article is available on the nonsenselit.org bookshelf: Carolyn Wells, “Limericks.” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, vol. 55, no. 5, March 1903, pp. 532-5.
It mostly consists of limericks by authors well-know at the turn of the twentieth century. Worth of a mention is the above carp, drawn by Oliver Herford for a limerick by [...]

Over at 5lines (A limerick a day!) I am publishing a series by Oliver Herford which appeared in the Century Magazine between 1911 and 1913.
Here is another humorous poem which appeared in the same magazine in the June 1930 issue (vol. Vol. LXXXVI, pp. 320-1).

Text and pictures by OLIVER HERFORD
A SCULPTOR once, in search of [...]

Ever since I heard of Google Earth I realised it would be very useful for limerick lovers, but I was too lazy to try and find out how to create interactive maps until I found this post at the Stoa Consortium blog; so here come kmz files for each of the four limerick books published [...]

The architect, John Prentiss Benson (1865-1947), had always dreamed of becoming an artist like his older brother Frank. In 1905 he lived in Flushing NY with his wife and four children and worked at his architecture firm of Benson and Brockway. He kept a studio in his home where he dabbled with paints, brushes, and [...]

I had just finished my previous post when I received the following article from Arthur:
A New Book of Nonsense
The nonsense craze started by Edward Lear in the 1840s eventually swept through the entire English speaking world. The spread, however, was more of a creep than an explosion in the early years by today’s standards.
In [...]

A number of early limerick books are now available for your online enjoyment, including the four published in the 1820s that inspired Edward Lear:

The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women. Illustrated with as many engravings; exhibiting their principal eccentricities and amusements. Much credit is due to our artist, I ween; For such pictures as these [...]