One of the myths perpetuated by Shaffer, and this new adaptation, is that Mozart never crossed anything out. He did, and he restructured sections eg using symbols to denote repeats. In K491 he ended up drawing faces instead of asterisks (zoom in). I was so happy to get to see this score at the RCM ❤️

Blimey, I feel seen here. If he were alive now Pepys would be sifting his inbox, deleting the LinkedIn notifications....

#otd 1914, Julia Henshaw, a botanist and explorer, & one of the very few women Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, gave a lecture on the wildflowers of Vancouver Island, at the Society. A teenage girl in the audience was transfixed: the flowers were beautiful, yes, but a WOMAN Explorer! 1/3

Not often you see stuff about deacessioning (I can see why the headline went for decluttering, but the article does use the technical term). The point, of course, is that this can be reduced if you have a robust collection development policy which enables you to be selective *when stuff is offered*.

Festival threads and outstanding one-offs in abundance in #Bestof2025: CLASSICAL MUSIC CONCERTS - the year's choice @davidnice.bsky.social with @alexandracoghlan.bsky.social @robertbealemcr.bsky.social @bernardhughes.bsky.social @boydtonkin.bsky.social & more www.theartsdesk.com/classical-mu...

Manchester Ship Canal, a 36-mile waterway linking the city to the Mersey estuary, opened for traffic on this day 1894. Eventually Manchester became Britain’s third busiest port. (Punch cartoon ridiculing the idea)

This year I remembered to get an order in for a calendar drawn from my @geograph-gbi.bsky.social images, so every month I'll share the image I used. You get to choose a cover image, so we kick off with an unseasonal one: Lavender growing at Mayfield Lavender Farm. www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4556454

One of the all-time great dinners here, and perhaps *the* definitive Victorian event. When we lived in SE19 the dinosaurs were always a joy, the last survivors of the Palace; used to think of all the people who'd stood and looked at them and written about it (HG Wells, E Nesbit)...

That's lovely - lies behind a lot of what we do at the Red House with visiting school groups, but I'd never put it into words. Some will be blown away by the history or music, some will be bored, but you (and they) don't know which, and every child should get the chance to find out.

I’m planning to step down as web and social media editor for @sslh.bsky.social after six very rewarding and enjoyable years. If you might be interested in the role, please DM me. sslh.org.uk

Good advice here: photographing file covers with the reference on is a good idea, too. (If you want to see an archivist weep inwardly, spend a week looking at hundreds of files then show them a phone photo of typescript and tell them you'd like to order a proper scan of "this page".)

Great stuff here from @grindrod.bsky.social and @municipaldreams.bsky.social: now wondering if I can schedule a visit to Thetford into the Christmas holiday. (I wasn't aware before this of the political dimension to expanded towns like Thetford as opposed to complete New Towns.)

Sir Titus Salt, mill-owner and philanthropist, died OTD in 1876. The model village of Saltaire was built between 1851 and 1871 to house his employees.

Anyone looking for the full map or wondering who made it, it’s the work of Matt Brown and it’s here. open.substack.com/pub/londonis...

Goodness, this rang true with me: I realise I feel much the same way about the Fens, I'm fascinated by them and can't stop visiting them, but every time they weird me out completely. A landscape made for unheimlich things to happen.

The Britten/Pears archive documents a whole creative circle, so the connections stretch a long way, but still it was a surprise when one of their colleagues popped up in this Julian and Sandy sketch: youtu.be/J5niJPJ7osU?... - "started in John Cranko's Nutcracker and worked his way up." 1/3

Died #OTD in 1937, English composer & poet, Ivor Gurney. His song cycle, Ludlow & Teme, was premiered privately in March 1920 at the London home of his friend Marion Scott, where Gurney hid shyly after the performance. open.spotify.com/track/5JtDQB... #britsymphyear

Working through the ALILI back catalogue at random means this is 18 months old, but: I had a jolt of recognition when Daria mentioned C18 word lists compiled by "Pallas". This is Peter Simon Pallas (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_S...), whom I knew from the fact a lot of Siberian birds carry his name.

Job klaxon! Manager role at Felixstowe Museum: landguard.com/job-vacancy/. Deadline is 17th January (application by CV + covering letter) so there's time to mull over Christmas...

Down into town briefly just now: Aldeburgh looking distinctly Christmassy.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Reading HG Wells' "The New Machiavelli" for the first time and I'm struck by how these days the Boer War rather sits in the shadow of the First World War, but at the time the novel came out, in 1911, it was every bit as traumatic: puncturing previous unthinking confidence in inevitable victory.

Happy Birthday to Srinivasa Ramanujan born #OTD in 1887. His papers are on display in the Wren Library and can be seen online here: archives.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php/pa... We are open to visitors 12-2pm today and tomorrow and reopen on 2nd January 2026. www.trin.cam.ac.uk/library/visi... #ramanujan

Always nice to see one of these, a dwindling number. Portland Road in South Norwood had one for a long time, which I enjoyed every time I passed it, but it's long gone. Still, when it's nobody's job to clear something away, the occasional one will slip through for many years...

For many years Christmas hasn't been Christmas until the King William's College quiz is in position... buying a Guardian daily used to ensure I didn't miss it, but for anyone who, like me, has got out of that habit, here's the link: kwc.im/wp-content/u...

What if London's Ringways had been built? A @lewisbaston.bsky.social special feature for OnLondon: www.onlondon.co.uk/lewis-baston... #london #transport

A Scottish geologist made a discovery that altered the way we see ourselves, and our planet. And yet his name is widely forgotten ✏️ @nigelwarburton.bsky.social

A Dickens Christmas ”God bless us, everyone!” A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, published #OTD 1843. British Library

SSHM invites submissions to its 2025/6 Roy Porter Essay Prize for the best original and unpublished essay in #histmed 🏆£500 first prize Open to all students (registered at the deadline for entries or were awarded their degree in 2025). For the entry form and rules and eligibility see👇 #histmed

🧵 As we head into one of the most exciting periods in our library's history, The Portico is seeking a new Chair of Trustees to help lead our exciting plans for the future...

#OTD 1843, a certain Mr Dickens took delivery of pre-publication copies of "A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" —wonder if he realised just how famous it would become! Here's a gallery of John Leech's original illustrations for it victorianweb.org/art/illustra...

📢 ARA SAT is recruiting! We’re looking for a Research Representative to join our committee in 2026. If you can bring insights from an academic/research perspective and help shape our programme of work, we’d love to hear from you. 👉 Full details: www.archives.org.uk/officer-vaca...

Getting decorations on the Christmas tree and it's turning into a mass gathering of @lithouse.bsky.social people: Elizabeth Gaskell from her house in Manchester, Charles Dickens from the Dickens House, Walter Scott from Abbotsford. Clearly the Red House needs to produce Britten & Pears decorations.

It's a thing of considerable sadness to me that the Windsock is no more - but at least there are things further down the thread that we can still enjoy. (Anyone who can drive along the A1 without enjoying the Sam Scorer building at Markham Moor is missing out in a big way.)

Great to see the interim Archives and Manuscripts catalogue up @britishlibrary.bsky.social You can access the catalogue here: searcharchives.bl.uk #archives #manuscripts #libraries

Feeling seen here, as the kids say. (Say? Said? Is that idiom now embarrassingly dated? There's probably a book that could tell me; onto the list it goes.)

Visiting @britishlibrary.bsky.social for a meeting a couple of years ago I went in via the staff entrance and was startled to see this. It would be nice to have it somewhere visible, ideally, though I suppose the new building's public areas are short of places it could go. 1/2

I've never read about these in detail, but there's something faintly familiar about them... Right at the end of the article it notes "There are suggestions that one or two of them survived into the 1990s"; I lived in Oxford in the 80s and cycled chunks of the A40 so I do wonder if I saw some.

The Cement & Concrete Association: diligent chroniclers of the UK’s post-WW2 infrastructure projects, always in shades of blue and grey!

#OnThisDay in 2001, at the age of 57, the German writer W. G. Sebald died while driving his car. In a special post we feature the many public domain books of which, and through which, Sebald speaks in his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn (1995) — publicdomainreview.org/collection/t... #otd

FACT OF THE DAY. 14 December 1918. Women- provided they were over 30 and they or their husbands were an occupier of property- were allowed to vote in a British General Election for the 1st time under the terms of the Representation of the People Act 1918.

Born #OTD in 1903, artist John Piper: here's a piece I wrote for @artukdotorg.bsky.social a while back about one of the many Piper artworks at the Red House, and what it tells us about his relationship with Britten and Pears> artuk.org/discover/sto... 1/2

This time five years ago: we got lucky in a raffle and stayed for a couple of nights in Grayson Perry's House for Essex, designed as a memorial like the Taj Mahal to his fictional Essex everywoman, Julie Cope. (More about the house here: www.geograph.org.uk/snippet/21330.)

One of my favourite British Transport films - surreal stuff featuring a talking litter basket *plus* a lot of London's long-gone Broad Street terminus. What more could one want?

Another meeting at Snape Maltings first thing, another quick trip to the car park quayside to capture a beautiful morning. There was a Little Grebe fishing middle distance, but it looks as though it was in mid-dive when I pressed to take the picture.

"Stephen Hawking’s Floppy Disks & the Digital Legacy of #Science: An Interview with Leontien Talboom" by Trevor Owens www.aip.org/library/ex-l... #scientists #digipres @aip.bsky.social

Born #onthisday in 1608, the English poet John Milton. Pictured here is the frontispiece to his first collection of poems, which contains a far from flattering portrait of the poet, and in the Greek beneath his erudite revenge... publicdomainreview.org/collection/j... #OTD

🌍 Help shape a new Migration Museum for Britain! We’re looking for 30 community-minded people to join our People’s Panel in London. Paid Feb 2026–Dec 2027. 📸 Photo: Sopo Ramischwili

Marvellous mail boxes of Paris, largely Modernist and you can see more here www.instagram.com/romainlaprade

Stamp klaxon - don't just throw them away...