Lux-Libris

* Books, Nooks, and All Things Meaningful *

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🕮 SELECTING A BOOK TO READ In 1906 At the 'Cozy Corner' home of Edward Kinsell, the Green Spring furnace station in Washington state, which served as a book depository and a free library for the rural area.

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📖 The BENCH Inside The BRITISH LIBRARY

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📖 Mmmmm....

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🕮 SANGORSKI & SUTCLIFFE JEWELED BINDING - Lord BYRON’s 'ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE' Splendid example of a Sangorski & Sutcliffe binding embellished with pearls, rubies, and sapphires; surrounded with a wreath of laurel enriched with 79 pearls; with Napoleon’s famous bee device at all corners, highlighted by mother-of-pearl wings. Bound within is an illuminated manuscript on vellum by L. Fairfax Murray, an artist of English Arts and Crafts movement. The book sold at Bonhams New York for $60,000. Sangorski & Sutcliffe is synonymous with fine binding, hailed as the 'Rolls Royce of Bookbinding.' At the turn of the twentieth century, Francis Sangorski and George Sutcliffe produced a variety of ornate, elaborate leather binding designs.

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🕮 THE LIBRARY OF ADMONT ABBEY in AUSTRIA The library of Admont Abbey (Stift Admont) is the largest monastic (including the all-embracing) library in the world, renowned for its Baroque architecture, art, and manuscripts. The Abbey was founded in 1074, and the separate library was completed in 1776; designed by the Austrian master builder Josef Hueber. The architecture and design express the ideals of the Enlightenment, against which the sculptures by Joseph Stammel create a striking contrast. The ceiling was decorated with frescoes by Bartolomeo Altmonte, showing the stages of human knowledge up to the high point of Divine Revelation. The library itself houses 70,000 volumes of the monastery’s 200,000 volumes in total. The most valuable among these are more than 1,400 manuscripts (the oldest dating to the 8th century AD) and the 530 incunabula (books printed before 1501).

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HOW TO LIVE ON $15 A WEEK In 1940

Originally posted at Stormy's Casino Royale in New Orleans

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OLD HARRY ROCKS In DORSET Standing guard on the coast of England are the massive chalk formations, Old Harry Rocks. Formed around 65 million years ago, the white outcroppings prominently mark the end of the Jurassic Coast, and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to legend, the stacks were named Old Harry as a euphemism for the devil, who allegedly used to nap on the rocks.

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📖 HATCHARDS BOOKSTORE In PICCADILLY London's most prestigious bookshop is also Britain's oldest - Hatchards first opened its doors to public in 1797 and swiftly became a thriving literary hub and a beloved institution. Today, it is home to more than 100,000 rare, limited, and first editions. Bestowed with no less than three royal warrants, it is one of the most refined and revered bookshops, and a landmark on one of London's most famous street, Piccadilly, since Georgian times. Beside royalty, its customers have been the literary, political, and social lions of their day, including Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Benjamin Disraeli, and Sir Winston Churchill, to name a few. Oscar Wilde so frequently signed his books there that the main table on the ground floor is still referred to as ‘Oscar’s table’. Letters from 1897 show that Wilde’s wife Constance, who was living abroad with their children following Wilde’s arrest, was friends with Hatchards manager Arthur Humphreys who provided her with news from Britain, and even sent her copies of Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Hatchards first publication was a political pamphlet, ‘Reform or Ruin: Take Your Choice’, demonstrating the establishment as a place of societal, political and religious discussion. Hatchards is also immortalised by Virginia Woolf in her novel 'Mrs Dalloway' (describing Clarissa Dalloway's journeys through Piccadilly): 'She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly... But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards' shop window?... Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home.'

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SUNRISE OVER PANCAKE ICE In ANTARCTICA (Cecil Whitt Photography)

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📖 POETS' CORNER In WESTMINSTER ABBEY A Place of Pilgrimage for Literature Lovers The practice of interring national figures - the kings, the queens, and the luminaries - in the Abbey began under Oliver Cromwell with the burial of Admiral Robert Blake in 1657. It had spread to include generals, admirals, politicians, doctors, and scientists, such as Isaac Newton in 1727 and Charles Darwin in 1882. Poets' Corner is a section of the South Transept of the Abbey where a number of poets, playwrights, and writers are buried and commemorated. The first poet to be interred was Geoffrey Chaucer (buried in the Abbey in 1400, transferred to Poets' Corner in 1556). Some of the notable pens include W. H. Auden, William Blake, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, William Congreve, Abraham Cowley, Charles Dickens, John Dryden, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Gray, Samuel Johnson, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Macaulay, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edmund Spenser, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Wordsworth. There are just six women writers commemorated - the Bronte sisters (in a group as one), Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen. Burial or commemoration in the Abbey does not always occur at the time of death. Lord Byron, whose poetry was admired but who maintained a scandalous lifestyle, died in 1824 but was not given a memorial until 1969. Even William Shakespeare, buried at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, was not honoured with a monument until 1740. Apparently, not all poets would have appreciated to be memorialised, as was the case of Samuel Wesley's epitaph for Samuel Butler: 'While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive, No generous patron would a dinner give; See him, when starv'd to death, and turn'd to dust, Presented with a monumental bust. The poet's fate is here in emblem shown, He ask'd for bread, and he received a stone.'

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HUGE TIFFANY STAINED GLASS DOME In the Driehaus Museum in Chicago, c1900

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🕮 The REMARKABLE HERITAGE & WIT Of ALEXANDRE DUMAS Alexandre Dumas, père, (1802-1870), was one of the most prolific and most popular French authors of the 19th century. His most popular works, 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and 'The Three Musketeers', have engrossed readers and actors for years. Yet many literary historians simply chose to erase his racial origins, leaving most readers, until recently, to assume the default - that the author of those works had to be white in order to write so vividly about white people, even though his race was anything but a secret during his lifetime. Dumas had an exotic pedigree and was of a mixed race heritage - the son of a French Nobleman and a grandson of the colonial governor who married a former Afro-Caribbean slave and ascended to the highest ranks of the French military during that country’s revolution, only to end up in an Italian dungeon and a poor man’s grave. The whiff of racism was such that only in 2002 was Dumas' body transferred to the Panthéon in Paris and reburied with full national honours. Despite the advantages of aristocracy and professional success, Dumas dealt with discrimination throughout his life and career. Even his fellow novelist Balzac referred to him as ‘that negro.’ The attacks grew worse as Dumas became more successful. Critics launched an endless, damaging public attack on Dumas, mocking his African heritage. “One famous caricature shows Dumas leaning over a hot stove on which he is boiling his white characters alive; his popping eyes glare demonically at a musketeer he is lifting to his impossibly huge lips, apparently about to sample the European flesh.” (from 'The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo' by Tom Reiss). The ad hominem attacks by Dumas’ nemesis, Eugène de Mirecourt, were especially vicious: “Scratch Monsieur Dumas’s hide and you will find the savage … a Negro!” Dumas’ quick wit served him well when he was attacked. Once, when his African ancestry was insulted, he famously replied: "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."

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☘ THE IRISH WIT - OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) When Oscar Wilde arrived in the United States in 1882, he was already a known figure in England. The reasons for his much heralded visit was to promote Gilbert & Sullivan's latest operetta, 'Patience' (which mocked the kind of dandy aesthete embodied by Wilde) while conducting a series of lectures on subjects of his own choosing. At this point, he was mostly known for his flamboyant behaviour and his wit rather than his writing--since, at this stage, he had published just a single volume of poetry. Asked by customs if he had anything to declare, Wilde memorably replied, ‘Only my genius.’

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👑 VIENNA CORONATION GOSPELS Known simply as the Coronation Gospels, a late 8th century hand-illuminated Gospel Book produced at the court of Charlemagne in Aachen is the manuscript  found in the tomb of Charlemagne when it was opened in the year 1000 by Emperor Otto III. The cover was created by the goldsmith Hans von Reutlingen of Aachen, c.1500; made in high relief in gold with inserted precious stones, it shows God the Father seated in front of the canopy of his throne, dressed in imperial vestments and wearing a mitre crown, similar to the one worn by Maximilian I, who was Holy Roman Emperor at the time the cover was produced.

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RAKOTZBRÜCKE (DEVIL'S BRIDGE) In GERMANY Nestled among the verdant foliage in Saxony’s Kromlauer Park, the Rakotzbrücke was commissioned in 1860 by the knight of Kromlau and a nature lover, Friedrich Hermann Rotschke. Several legends are attributed to this architectural masterpiece, namely that the architect who drafted the bridge had made a pact with the Devil in order to be able to build such an unique feat. In exchange, the devil demanded to take the soul of the very first person who would cross the bridge.The architect, true to his word, walked the bridge himself once it was completed.

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FORMER PARIS STOCK EXCHANGE TURNED INTO NEW ART MUSEUM The Bourse de Commerce is a unique circular structure under a historic dome which once served as the city’s grain store. It is one of the great structural treasures of the city, considered as being on par with Notre-Dame cathedral for its architectural heritage. François Pinault, the billionaire luxury brand owner and the major donor to Notre-Dame's reconstruction project, has converted the 19th century building into art museum in collaboration with Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Pinault, whose luxury group owns world’s most famous fashion brands, from Yves Saint Laurent to Gucci--as well as Christie’s auction house--has been searching for a Paris home for his €1.25bn art collection of more than 3,500 works.

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📚 'THE BOOKWORM' STATUE in Berlin, Germany 40-foot sculpture in front of the Humboldt University in Berlin, at the Walk of Ideas, remembering the dark era of book burning and commemorating the invention of modern book printing.