I wrote a thing about Virginia Woolf, and being a shonky printer, and making imperfect books that are really about playing with the people you love. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Dennis Duncan · At Charleston: Hogarth Press

There is something magnetic about the large case containing all 34 titles that Virginia Woolf made. With their marbled,...

lrb.co.uk

One for @baindex.org

As we head into a long holiday weekend in the US, our staff share their summer reading recommendations, including books by @glumghost.bsky.social and @djbduncan.bsky.social ... and Moby Dick! buff.ly/bBLLeqj

A blog about posters, ballads, flawed children.

Sammy Slap

Posters, Ballads, Flawed Children.

open.substack.com

The final resting place of Amanda McKittrick Ros, the worst novelist in the English language.

Have you seen this fly?

A student in my Civil War history course brought by an interesting artifact she once found in a Baltimore used book store. It appears to be a scrapbook kept by a journalist during the 1860s, with an index of topics in the front. Very cool!

A little blog about confetti open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Confetti

A few years ago, the bookshop Foyle’s moved next door to itself.

open.substack.com

Maundy Thursday is named for St Maundy, or Mandy, who was a waitress at the last supper (Luke 22:14). In the Middle Ages a popular ballad, ‘Raundy Maundy’, celebrated her fertility.

Postdoc klaxon! Spend a year in our lovely English dept at UCL. English lang or lit, PhD awarded post Oct 23. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Job klaxon! Come and be an Early Modernist at UCL: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Someone was trying to take a portrait of their two fave Chickens, and this happened.

“A shoe-dryer?!”

I wrote a little essay about the early English filmmaker Charles Goodwin Norton substack.com/home/post/p-...

'The Bill Poster' (1899)

Charles Goodwin Norton on Marchmont Street

substack.com

Latest catalogue from @blackwells.bsky.social is books by – or owned by – Naomi Michison. One for you @jennykenyon.bsky.social? blackwells.co.uk/rarebooks/ca...

Would you be interested? Spotted by a friend in London

The Lovejoy reboot you didn’t realise you needed

Someone’s left a stuffed ferret outside the library on my road. Yours for the taking if you can get to Muswell Hill fast enough.

Charity shop find: early C20 scrap book. Somebody likes lobsters. @drbibliomane.bsky.social

My friend just bought me this book of found shopping lists and I can't stop imagining they're Emily Dickinson poems. “Chicken — Brockley — — Milk”. I think it’s about death.

At the Natural History Museum looking at mayflies trapped in amber. Biomatter that gets frozen in amber like this is called an "inclusion". Isn't that a wonderful word to conjure with.

Unhelpfully, this is what the weather forecast used to look like in the Times. I only wanted to say whether it was sunny or not in London. Can anyone translate?

This is Winnie the Harris hawk. She comes to the British Library twice a week to scare away the pigeons.

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

A quick blog about funeral biscuits, the ephemera around them, and a boy who could eat a kilo of them in four minutes. open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Funeral Biscuits

And eighteenth-century speed eating

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Mandarins, Italian paired with Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan Day 19 of #BooksAreMyJam, in which I pair a language-y book from my shelves with today's jam from the Bonne Maman jamvent calendar

A little blog about printing, writing and funeral tickets open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Forms of Death

Remember to Die... And bring this Ticket with you.

open.substack.com

UM LIVRO PARA DOIDOS POR LIVROS (Índice, uma história do, de Dennis Duncan. Como alguém consegue pesquisar assunto tão obscuro e curioso? Eleito pela New Yorker um dos melhores livros de 2022, é irresistível para quem é amante das palavras, leitor de raridades ou viciado em linguagem.)

Such a lot of bastards

Ne pas oublier Michèle Audin (1954-2025) Michèle Audin, mathématicienne, historienne, autrice, membre de l'Oulipo, spécialiste de la Commune, femme engagée et passionnée, fille de Maurice Audin, nous a quittés ce matin. En hommage, Diacritik republie un article sur son superbe Oublier Clémence,…

Ne pas oublier Michèle Audin (1954-2025)

Michèle Audin, mathématicienne, historienne, autrice, membre de l'Oulipo, spécialiste de la Commune, femme engagée et passionnée, fille de Maurice Audin, nous a quittés ce matin. En hommage, Diacritik republie un article sur son superbe Oublier Clémence, paru en 2018. Lire, relire Michèle Audin.

diacritik.com