Recent acquisitions (yay!)

[monissaw.livejournal.com]

These two books look useful. They have pictures (paintings & drawings) arranged by year/decade, that show what someone is wearing (as on the cover) and the accompanying descriptions are fairly detailed, and broken up in Head, Body & Accessories. So you can see what real people (as opposed to fashion models) where wearing at a particular time and find out the right names for things. Which is Really Useful.

The smaller book covers the 19th century and the larger ones is 1300 to 1984. Despite the different authors & format, they're related, Some of the entries for book 1 are book 2, but not as many because it doesn't cover each centruy is as much detail.



Late Christmas presents :)

I read a review of Emporium but that was't clear it was a coffee-table book with large pictures & small cation or text heavy with a few pictures. It's about the development of advertising, and I thought a book that had a lot of pictures but also enough text to develop the themes would be good. And that's what it is! Each two pages is about a different topic, with examples of ads over the period. Light enough to be fun to dip into but detailed enough to worthwhile.

Hobart Town & Environs I bought with Christmas money. It's been on my list to buy for a while, being a useful sort of book, but it's not cheap. Out of print, limited print run & (if buying online) it's a large hardback (which you can't tell from that photo, but it's been relegated to the "Tall books that won't fit on the shelf they should be on & books about maps" shelf. (The map books needed somewhere to go and they tend to be tall, glossy hardbacks.)

The Georgian & Regency house book I bought with the left over Christmas money. It thought it might reassuring. I make assumptions about houses from that period based on what I know about Victorian hoses & houses I've visited but it's always better to base things on actual facts & knowledge rather than assumptions, and I thought that Australian houses from that era would still be strongly influenced by English ways of doing things. So, it seemed a worthwhile sort of purchase. (It is focused mainly on town houses, which tended to have kitchens & other utilitarian rooms in the basement, whereas if you look at existing Australian Georgian houses, they generally have their kitchens etc. out the back, because at they time they were built they had room to do this rather than excavating down. But now I wonder about houses that were built "in town", in what would now be the inner city areas. Did they need to better utilise the space?) So, now I have three books about houses!


So I made a new shelf category "Houses". But they look lonely. There needs to be another medium/large book in there