for the incredibly broad range of interests represented by very few readers

travis-hill-europa (whose real name rather than eBay username will remain unmentioned) has another five hundred books listed on eBay, plus two hundred original photographs done in the 1930s for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics...the images are presumably all available online but this is a chance to get some idea of what vintage prints of them look like...as well as to speculate how such a quantity of them ended up in Germany (all of the books that follow are physically situated in Munich, apparently). travis-hill-europa suggests they were printed for some international exposition or other.

This bookseller has gotten out of the business of alchemical texts that led to such well-nigh endless trouble (see earlier posts on this topic) and now deals only in items from the early 19th century through circa 1957, but these range from travel guides and photo albums circa 1900 to architectural books from modernist villas in 1930 to how-to books from the heyday of Stalinist architecture, with a grim stop at town planning in Germany, 1939.
The Colonial Exposition of 1931 and Paris exposition of 1937 are well represented, with reminders of how bizarrely cramped the public spaces of these expositions actually were (note the replica Angkor Wat visible from the West African section, the kind of excess of decontextualized, miniaturized architecture that would occur again decades later in odd parts of Asia and Europe but more famously in Las Vegas):


And I could go on, but will not. Except to note that this year marks the centenary of the insufficiently remembered Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition:

footnotes as usual

The Taman Mini (Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature) site in Jakarta would be one of the later juxtapositions of geographically diverse architecture to which I refer in the preceding post.

I also wanted to remind fans of the Ægypt cycle or of John Dee in general that the good magister's death anniversary either went unremarked in December or (more likely, according to The Queen's Conjurer) is coming up on March 26. A new novel puts it at March 28, and I suppose it is appropriate that Dee's date of demise is as uncertain or multilayered as is everything else about him.