Richard Fallon

Jacket of CUP’s 1932 “cheap” edition of Science and the Modern World, bearing a quotation from Herbert Read’s review for The Criterion.

Nick Gaskill and I are organising a panel on Whitehead, focused on Science & the Modern World, for the MSA/BAMS conference in 2026, and are looking for an additional contributor.

Email me by 25 November on michael.whitworth@ell.ox.ac.uk if you’re interested! #WeirdModernisms #BAMS2026 #MSA2026

Ah thanks for getting back to me. Shame — I had been thinking it was an interesting precedent for The Lost World's hoax photographs a few years later.

Illustration from 1921 French edition of 'The Devil's Foot', with Holmes and Watson bursting through a door.

@doingsofdoyle.com I've just been listening to your excellent episode on 'The Adventure of the Devil's Foot'. Did you ever come across that intriguing special spin-off edition of the Strand, containing alleged photographs of the scene of the crime?

Their depictions of prehistoric animals surely the most pleasingly unwieldy and grotesque

A detail from Levi Walter Yaggy's chromolithographic 1887 chart, Physical Geography: a classic mid-century Iguanodon dominates the 'Pre-Adamite' Mesozoic, dwarfing the timid-looking bipedal dinosaur half-heartedly added above. Whole image viewable on the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

CfP Deadline Approaching! The deadline to submit an abstract for this year's BSLS conference is this Friday (12th Dec) more details here: www.bsls.ac.uk/conference20...

If your carriage door stops outside the platform overpass steps at Cambridge station it really is a game changer. Without that... you're lost.

Ahead of its time due to the mix of its esoteric subjects, ranging from esoteric cosmology and extraterrestrial life to paranormal phenomena such as survival after bodily death and the Cottingley fairy photo's which the book also reproduces, next to images of the milky way (as seen on the cover)

Think we might be haunted. Found this 1948 sixpence inside the duvet cover. The old timey radio music from no earthly device starts next.

Tempura is stripped of the meaning we traditionally attach to fried food, which is heaviness. Here flour recovers its essence as scattered flower, diluted so lightly that it forms a milk and not a paste; taken up by the oil, this golden milk is so fragile that it covers the piece of food imperfectly, reveals here a pink of shrimp, there a green of pepper, a brown of eggplant, thus depriving the fry of what constitutes our fritter, which is its sheath, its envelope, its density.

Roland Barthes is eating tempura:

Human form of a tree in Nicolai Klimii iter svbterranevm : novam tellvris theoriam ac historiam qvintae monarchiae adhvc nobis incognitae exhibens e bibliotheca B. Abelini (1741) by Holberg, Ludvig, 1684-1754; Mentzel, Johann Georg, 1677-1743

Tree /human hybrid. Book illustration from Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), author of the satirical fantasy Niels Klim's Underground Travels (1741)
#satire #scifi #Enlightenment #18th #18thC

Mastodontico: mammoth, gigantic

English sorely needs to steal this Italian adjective. Attempts were made in the nineteenth century to make 'mastodontic' catch on, but the much inferior adjective form of 'mammoth' won out. How much longer must we wait?

14,000 followers 🎉🎉

Thank you so much!
#SharingTheWonder #CreatingAdvocatesForThePlanet

Decadence seeping into the Newnham College Debating Society at Cambridge. Saturday 8 December 1900: 'That this house rejoices in the artificiality of the age!' Sadly lost, 69 to 41, with 7 neutrals. Interestingly, this was just eight days after Oscar Wilde's death.

If you've published a book in 2025 related to literature and science--get your publisher or a current @thebsls.bsky.social member to nominate it for the Book Prize! Nominations are open until December 31! #academicsky

Two very different approaches to illustrating the same Conan Doyle story during the same period. Left: Sydney Seymour Lucas in the Strand, December 1921; right, Władysław T. Benda in Hearst's International, August 1922. Both for 'The Nightmare Room' (www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Th...).

3/4 sketch portraits of Herschel (left) and Faraday (right) on a small piece of paper, laid on top of a letter. MS. eng. lett. C. 718, fold. 138-143. Bodleian Libraries. Digital surrogate online.

Nice little break from transcribing letters: found these doodles of Faraday @rigb.org and Herschel in a letter from novelist Maria Edgeworth (1802-1869) in 1844 @bodleian.ox.ac.uk, writing about Faraday’s Xmas lectures on electricity - pretty solid likenesses to be honest!

Edinburgh University Press Journals - Journal Home - Victoriographies Home

‘Marie’ Christmas, Victorianists!
Eleanor Dobson and I have co-edited ‘Marie Corelli Reconsidered’, a special issue of Victoriographies.
It features @janetteleaf.bsky.social Adam Lewis Smith, Keiko Kiriyama, Stephen Edwards, and our own detective work into the authorship of The Twin Soul (1887) 🔍

There's nothing about that cover I don't like

The Strand version sounds rather more tactful. And rather more like Jack Nicholson.

It's a good point. Haven't had a chance yet to return to Sarjeant or indeed any of the 1ry/2ry sources (including my own book), but when I do it would be interesting to see if there's any true confirmation that Arthur Smith Woodward visited as planned in 1909 and ID'd the prints as Iguanodon.

The boy who's half a man / And the man who's half a boy?

I'm finding comparing the texts rather therapeutic so far...

Good, isn't it? There are so many covers of this novel, it would make for a great mini-exhibition somewhere.

Located copies. However Doyle's Iguanodon footprints, and the casts of them, are still at large.

Jack Ashby, a man wearing a green jumper, standing in front of a Giant Deer.

Richard Fallon, wearing a Sedgwick Museum t-Shirt, standing with a diplodocus model speaking to visitors.

A collections team staff member wearing a Sedgwick Museum t-shirt pointing to an Ichthyosaur snout. They are speaking to visitors.

The Sedgwick Museum Archivist standing at their stall talking to 2 visitors. The stall has archive facsimiles on it.

Behind the Scenes at the Sedgwick Museum. 🦖

We explored our Collections Team’s favourite specimens, the archive and the evolution of scientific ideas with @richardfallon.bsky.social.

We heard from @jackdashby.bsky.social about his new book on Natural History Museums.

Thank you for coming!

An Abstract (?) Expressionist #FossilFriday: Essence of a Graptolite (2014) by Sue Purcell. It 'was inspired by a fossil I found during a field trip with the fossil club at the Lower Llanfawr Quarry, Llandrindod Wells, Powys. Mid-Wales' (www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting...)

A beautiful microscope in the @sedgwickmuseum.bsky.social collections connected — although we're not yet sure in what manner — with Gertrude Elles.

Now available online! www.cambridge.org/core/books/h... 🌿📚💚🪲

60 years ago today, Gamera: The Giant Monster (1965) was released in theaters in Japan. #60smovie #60sSciFi #kaiju #Gamera