Emily Cockayne

A detail from a title page from 1562: the image shows a table with various brushes and various mixing flasks. A few of the flasks are hand-colored.

These strange color decisions of the 1560s do have a background story. A short 🧵 for #bookhistory.

Two-year Postdoc position in research project Healthy Plastics from Waste The Environmental Archaeology and Materials Science group, responsible for scientific research at the National Museum of Denmark, has a vacancy for a Postdoc. T

Great postdoc opportunity, to work with Prof Yvonne Shashoua on her Healthy Plastics from Waste project at the National Museum of Denmark: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Amplifying voices New Cambridge grant to help under-represented scholars publish

Thrilled about this new grant we are offering for under-represented early career scholars. The first cycle is for scholars in history and area studies. Please spread the word widely. @universitypress.cambridge.org

*********************************

Read more here: 🔗 cup.org/4pF5xvr

I can’t! They’re 450 miles away!

The press used to make from Edward & Eva Pinto, 'Tunbridge and Scottish Souvenir Woodware', 1970, p. 125:

Bois Durci plaque, France c.1857 from powdered sawdust (rosewood or ebony) & slaughterhouse blood, steam-heat hydraulically pressed to look like carved hard wood. An ethically complex compound, but my favourite 19thC plastic. These were sometimes stuck onto pianos to make them look more high-end.

Oh no!

Viagra eat your heart out!

Everything about the advert is gross!

The Prince of Fluid Beef is a weird flex

Context help! I’m trying to fix a possible date on this papier mache snuff box. I *think* the words are “Playing at Hazar”. Anyone got any leads? I suspect the box is e19thc and possibly American.

Interesting! The intonation can flatten the prose.

I always get my computer to read it to me, else I massage out all the errors when I read it myself.

Also, Leftovers, Eleanor Barnett (waste food, history of)

MINE! Rummage, 2020 (History of Recycling)

*or rather the slave trade. The narrative is extremely slanted to the colonial white elites

When elephants are mentioned it is in this context: “this will save the elephants for their correct use: to be hunted by rich men.” Slavery is mentioned more often than elephants

The box boasts 'These goods have all the merits of ivory without any of the drawbacks. They do not crack, or go out of true and are [sic] same colour throughout'

The modern plastics story develops here, with billiard balls. A $10,000 competition in 1863 ramped up experimentation. These English-made 'Crystalate' (cellulose nitrate) balls, sold by Burroughes & Watts, date from the early interwar period. Fears that they could explode were eventually quashed.

(I had no cress, so had to imagine the contents for my sketch).

Monix Ivorine Sandwich Flags tell a story about plastics use c. 1930. Monix specialised in printing onto plastic; the company also made tags for garden plants. Possible sandwiches offered: 'cress', ham & tongue, sardine. Reuseable & wipe-cleanable, they straddle the fripperies/utilitarian divide.

Halex Xylonite 'Cloth Brush', from the late 1930s. Made by the British Xylonite Company, an early plastics manufacturer, based in Hale End, Walthamstow from 1900.

This is one of the objects that forms part of the collection I am using for research for my project at AIAS, Aarhus this year.

Unlike modern plastics, these can be heated and re-moulded. They are formed of natural substances, and classed as semi-synthetics. The brooch was likely made during the early twentieth century.

Back to watercolour sketching, after to-ing and fro-ing to collect plastics for my project here in Aarhus. This cameo brooch is made from early thermoplastics, a melted down set of false teeth. The pink (gum) part is vulcanite, the ivory (tooth) cellulose nitrate - two plastics I am researching.

Should you find yourself in the general Peterborough area, I'm giving a talk in aid of the John Clare Cottage appeal on Sat 15 Nov, 3pm
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inconvenie...

Yarvin is a full-blown techno-fascist and the fact that the University of Oxford sees fit not only to platform him but to give him the floor entirely should sound the loudest alarm bell it's possible to sound about the number of elite fascist sympathizers in the UK right now.

I live in Denmark at the moment, so haven’t been able to see my new paperback. Back for a flying visit, here she is at Waterstones, on the shelf two books away from PV Glob’s book on bog bodies — which I read as a (morbid) child, sparking my interests in history and Denmark!

Is it Salamanca Street?

Handwriting help needed! What is this place or institution in Lambeth in 1862?

Daily Telegraph today: