Ian Gadd

Printing presses kept their letters in cases.

Capital letters went in the upper case.
Smaller letters went in the lower case.

This is why we say ‘UPPER CASE’ and ‘lower case.’

Ok, but what did we call them before the invention of the printing press?

MAJUSCULE and minuscule.

‘Almost unheard of’: experts find more music by English composer Henry Purcell Printed score and keyboard manuscript by Purcell, who died in 1695, unearthed in Worcestershire and Norfolk

GOOD NEWS !
"A team of musicologists has unearthed the printed score of a previously unknown Purcell song, as well as the original manuscript for various keyboard compositions."
#baroque #music
www.theguardian.com/music/2025/o...

Yes, only for it to be increased the following year! We have now increased the excess, which seems to have brought the monthly amount back down to roughly the same level. But I fear it's a losing battle...

Celebrating Renaissance London – Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution Contrary to its reputation as a hotbed of dour anti-fun Puritans, the early modern City of London was a place of lively and extravagant performance traditions. This talk will explore a range of civic ...

Long way off but hey. Come to @brlsi.bsky.social in November!

www.brlsi.org/whatson/cele...

THIS.

Melvyn Bragg decides to step down from presenting In Our Time After 26 years on the programme, the legendary presenter bids farewell to the series

A huge moment -- Melvyn Bragg steps down from In Our Time after over a quarter of a century. What a programme and what a legacy! Just a model for how to make great, clever, engaging radio, and a twenty-seven-year experiment that proves there's a huge global audience for smart, scholarly programming.

Sisyphus’s Inbox “And I saw Sisyphus in agonizing torment, drafting a reply to Kayleigh’s ten urgent UX questions. He hit ‘send,’ and immediately received an autore...

“There, Sisyphus toils—straining to zero the inbox, only for Nathan to smite him with that cruelest of follow-ups: ‘Just checking if you saw this?’”
— Virgil, Aeneid

Welcome to Day 2 of Swedish Church on a Skateboard!

It should arrive at 5pm Swedish time (GMT+2), greeted by a gospel choir.
Will be amazing to see how they get it off the skateboard.

Live feed here: lkab.com/kalender/kyr...

Very exciting: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography published a cluster of new entries on women stationers. See the intro by Valerie Wayne: www.oxforddnb.com/newsitem/906...

ODNB entries are so helpful in identifying women from traces on printed material. So happy to see this work ❤️

I love Terry Gross she is a top ten person

I seem to remember that Terence Hawkes made the same parallel in a 1990s TV documentary on Shakespeare/early modern theatre… @tracelarkhall.bsky.social may remember??

Aha! Probably a healthier approach... And, yes, it's been too long since we last caught up — Amherst??

I was (briefly) at Reading but university responsibilities are getting in the way of research and conference attending alas...

PS. Still a night-owl, I see… 😬

An even more impressive memory!

And, yes, the house share was quite something... 😂

Impressive archival sleuthing! But I’d expect nothing less…

It’s what apocalyptic times call for…

Photograph of Tom Lehrer

Oh no. Tom Lehrer gone. At his great age, it’s not a tragedy, I know, but it just does feel bad not having his genius in the world.

😂 Maybe! It was my only experience of RGS in that era and I do remember thinking that never again would I have an audience who were prepared to sit on the floor to hear me speak...

...a US Civil War pistol. (Her grandfather(!) was apparently the youngest US Civil War general...)

Everyone else tried to act like it was a completely normal thing to do while subtly leaning out of the way 😂

Yes, I think it was. May(?) 2000, in her rooms at Trinity. I began my paper by apologising for not bringing a gun — as a rather clumsy prelude to a discussion about the respective symbolic power of guns vs books — only to have AB pipe up and say "I have one here", opening a drawer & bringing out...

...early modern guns. It was a lot of fun with loads of fascinating rabbit-holes (urine collection, unfortunate explosions, guns in art etc), so I can't wait for the book 😊 It also prompted Professor Anne Barton to pull out a (real) gun in front of several dozen rather startled faculty & students...

Ooh, this is great! Very keen to hear more about your book project: 20 years ago I researched early modern guns for a seminar paper that compared state regulatory practice of guns/gunpowder with regulation of printing/publishing and was really surprised to find so little research on...

Pageant Stations: Civic Entertainments in The London Journal Published in The London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present (Ahead of Print, 2025)

NEW VIEWPOINT ARTICLE: 'Pageant Stations: Civic Entertainments in The London Journal', by @tracelarkhall.bsky.social, available open access.

A little 🧵 on the insights it provides...

I think the scribe heard (or read) Sogdahl and then corrected it, hence that slight mess in the middle of the word...

What's the document?

Sogndal - Wikipedia

Sogndal?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogndal Sogndal - Wikipedia

I’ve just put my trousers on back to front.

Im 62 on Sunday.

The boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max It was, we were told, a case of sudden infant death syndrome interrupted. What followed would transform my understanding of parenting, disability and the breadth of what makes a meaningful life

I wrote for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine about my son Max, who changed how I see the world. Took ages. More jokes after the first bit.

Thanks Merope Mills for being the most patient and generous editor.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

BHO is having intermittent downtime at the moment.

We're being hammered by AI bots and scrapers, overloading our servers. Our server engineers will be back on the case after the long weekend.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but this is due to third-party bad actors.

Given I did quite a bit of research on this second misprint back in the day I’m half-wondering if I can report this as evidence of impact… 😂

I was genuinely impressed by the fact they included the “god’s great asse” misprint but they really could have done with some expert guidance on the physicality of a 17th-century bible…