Note to self: add “catalog the pike” to next week’s to-do list...

Boston Public Library holds the “pattern pike” used by John Brown to order arms for the raid. According to BPL records, it passed from Brown to John Hopper (son of Isaac), to William Lloyd Garrison, and thence to the library. Yes, it is SHARP.

OUT NOW ❤️‍🔥The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities by Dorothy Berry is now available: www.weherespace.org. The first 50 copies sold will be signed.

Oh no no no, this is so awful. He was such an incredible artist and we should have had so much more music from him, even if it was always sporadic. A true goddamn genius gone way way too soon. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Matthew Wasserbach, brokerage manager of Express Customs Clearance, said of the UPS backlog. “It’s totally unprecedented.” @cnbc.com $UPS www.nbcnews.com/business/bus...

Here’s a typical bundle of file papers from the Boston Municipal Court archives. It probably hasn’t been unwrapped since it was docketed in 1822. The organization of the sub-layers is significant, & I always photograph bundles so that I can put them back together as I found them. I love this work! 🗃️

I love community cookbooks. #newacq

I am seeking book recommendations for everyday life of women in colonial and early republic US, esp. if published since 2000. Suggestions?

Nothing like misreading a product page and ordering half the number of prosthetics you actually need. 🤦🏻‍♀️😭 On the upside, it’s a new to me product and doesn’t seem to suck. (And it’s not goddamn pink!) So I just ordered another so I’ll have a pair. Happy pink-fucking-tober to me.

IT’S BACK. 🦑

“For Major Thomas Lenord to be poubbleshed to the several coumpeneys acording to the content of sad procllemation as folloeth: to the several compeneys in ould Tunton Freetown and dart -mouth of the remaing [remaining] compeneys I acknowledge of my sellef, Benjan Church Colonel”

Today’s paleography challenge. We figured it out, eventually. Massachusetts, 1711, on a broadside printed in Boston. Going through the library’s broadside boxes is really hammering home for me the patterns that happen again and again and again in this country.

Spooky season is finally here! This Office of the Dead features a scene of the raising of Lazarus with skull-tacular details ☠️ Book of Hours produced in Italy and dated 1507, now @bodleian.ox.ac.uk MS. Douce 9, fols. 182v-183r

I have plotted for YEARS that when (if) I own a place with a powder room, it’s getting some kind of silvered wallpaper with flowers and critters.

Archivist job! The Boston Public Library (BPL) is seeking an archivist for a 3-year grant-funded position to survey, inventory, and manage historic institutional records related to BPL’s Central Library in Copley Square.

very pleased to be offering an open ended Archives Cataloguing post working with the University of Edinburgh's wide and deep literary archives. please do share with anyone interested! elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

🧵

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Dear autocorrect: No, I definitely did not mean “Prada” when I typed the name of the museum in Madrid. 🙄🙃

This was a new one for me. Wondering if it is mishap driven.

Snakeskin Bookmarks (Yes, Really) 📜 #LibraryofCongress #Conservation blogs.loc.gov/loc/2025/09/...

📢We are now accepting applications for the position of Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America. View the full job posting📝, including application instructions, at the link below. Please share with your networks! 🔗https://bibsocamer.org/news/job-posting-bsa-executive-director

They're The Same Picture.

At the Brigham for the first time and this place feels like a gd habitrail. Glass tunnels and walls and levels and connectors and it’s nuts.

Line go up

Covid AND norovirus spiking in Boston wastewater rn. FUN.

The @kcrw.com Art Insider newsletter is back from vacation, with a look at Ken Gonzales-Day's new survey at the Fisher Museum. I have a look at the way in which the land holds the stories of our most terrible histories. email.kcrw.com/ken-gonzales...

Some reflections on replicas, the internet's untethering of information from reproductions of works of art, and a lovely email I received from a stranger one year ago. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/8/30/will-the-real-hildegard-von-bingen-please-stand-up-its-replicas-all-the-way-down

Corset busks!

Embroidered memorial for 1 adult and 3 infants under 10 months of age.

Nantucket museum, sperm whale skeleton.

Reposting, because end of day Friday in August = minimal eyeballs! Also I love it.

Today’s waste paper vernacular binding is made of yellow tobacco packaging, circa 1860. BPL call no. E449.S951 c.2

Gorgeous not-green greens at the Copley Square farmers market today in Boston. They weren’t labeled, but I think this might be amaranth?

fwiw, "help a teacha out" is the brainchild of maximus simmons, a rising senior at oakland high who is also the student director on the ousd board of education (www.ousd.org/board-of-ed/...). if you're feeling up for it, he would love your support!

Cambridge Day reports police ultimately used pepper spray and tear gas to get the barricaded machete man, which sickened several residents of the building, who had earlier refused police entreaties to evacuate, even after being promised hotel rooms. www.cambridgeday.com/2025/08/02/p...

I wrote a little about writing about bread when millions are being denied it right now newsletter.wordloaf.org/bread-not-as...

Bluesky has always been a place for Tom Lehrer fans! I made this feed a long time ago

I have a folded dish towel over my extra-bright green, never-turns-off AC display. Blue painter’s tape on the blue light on a charging block & the white light on a speaker. In hotel rooms, I drape hand towels over microwave lights & clocks. It’s all so obnoxious. Apps controlling it would be worse.

That bibliolist is listing again, and lol at 150 people.

One of the best parts of my job is getting to see a patron gleefully going through their requested item in the reading room, gasping and cooing and grinning ear-to-ear as they turn the pages.

“Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us. And that guac is extra.”

So much to unpack here, in both words and image.

"Today, the textile’s history is largely absent from [curricula] + ignored by labor + economic historians, tho [lace] 'embodies everything: gender, wealth, capitalism, colonialism... If you know how to read it, it can talk to us'" untappedjournal.com/stories/elen...

Fore edge? Fore-edge? Fore edge, unless you’re saying “fore-edge painting”? Halp, I’m getting stuck in bibliographic weeds…

What an unexpected treat to find out that an exhibition catalog I bought has DOUBLE fore edge decorations! I love these artists so much, and this is just a delectable little cherry on top. 📜📚

Lox. Can’t get past the odor. Don’t even like handling a plate it’s been sitting on because of the stinky oily residue.

I need to read more, but, like, what money is changing hands? Are we paying countries to take people? Are these countries paying us? Because SOMEONE is getting paid. Always. (Especially the contractors.)