This caught my eye because it’s just weird to print a newspaper by lithography from a handwritten original. So I went a-searching, and discovered that this was the first Yiddish-language newspaper produced in America. Now the lithography makes much more sense; to produce a Yiddish newspaper you need a newspaper press and a set of […]
This is DR9 R30, but there’s nothing much in the catalogue about it, which is too bad. It’s a token of appreciation for someone from his co-religionists, in Italian, dated Genoa 1956 (click image to see bigger). We’re looking at it because it has a pretty border, more or less; nothing particularly innovative or unusual […]
Presenting the latest iteration of Tefillin Barbie. I’d keep making them like the original ones, but the ones with the long denim skirts are more or less impossible to find for a reasonable price now. I think this one’s quite cute; it’s the sort of outfit bat mitzvah girls wear. She’s available here. Now with […]
A clip from a testimonial,* signed by appreciative members of an Italian community in 1956. In the subsequent sixty years, note how one of the substances in the black ink has spread out around the signature, giving it a sort of halo. Ink can be funny like that. It’s one of the reasons artists use […]
Drawer 9 has a lot of pretty things like this: They’re mostly in Italian or Latin, and they have the most lovely illuminated borders, with coats of arms of cardinals. What they are are testimonials. When you supplied things such as furniture to cardinals’ households in seventeenth-century Rome, they might give you a testimonial, which […]
I thought this picture looked familiar when I saw it in the drawer. It’s the inside of the Great Synagogue at Stockholm, which still has organ at its Shabbat services, and is most particular about employing a non-Jewish organist to play. So what is this? An old-school Reform confirmation certificate, from 1939. (Click image at […]
