Herg blerg

I bought a couple more magazines on eBay. I can't help but be a little nervous that I'm spending too much and getting ~addicted~, but really everybody spends money on their passions and I've got a paycheck now. I need to figure out what I'm doing with the scans - I might make pages on my blog for each magazine, and just upload all the pictures? How much bandwidth does Blogger give you? Well, I'm trying it now.

Yesterday I looked into the Chapman's library more - there is a tiny card catalogue down in the archive, and I looked up Godey's, Peterson's, Montgomery-Ward, etc. in it. There was one Godey's (1858, I think), and none of the others, so I'm thinking that most of the ones I'm interested in are actually in the house's library, which is sort of interesting. After talking with Tim, I think the sort of books they want to give to the town library are the city directories and high school yearbooks and local histories. Which is pretty obvious, now that I think about it without the same panic I get when I see a Delineator on eBay for $80, that "oh no gone forever from my hot little hands" feeling.

ETA: Well, here is one magazine, not all the scans are great but I can fix them sometime. I bought an 1834 magazine on eBay for $26 including shipping, so that should go up sometime.

ETA2: Well, that ate a lot of my Blogger/Picasa space. Switching to Flickr for scan hosting, I'm not sure I want to buy extra storage space just yet. Except Flickr is giving me sass as well. Um. Give me some more time to think about this.

The Secret Duke

So I decided I needed to read a romance novel, because I haven't done that in a while, but I only read Jo Beverley and Eloisa James now because the rest have too high a frequency of irritation for me. I hadn't read a Jo Bev in a long time so I can't remember what exactly it was that put her on my good list, but I saw one of hers at the book sale and it involved kidnappings, so yeah.

Anyway it's interesting to me because of the way RegencyWorld gets into people's heads. There have been a couple of instances where I'm impressed with Beverley's comparative understanding of 1760s clothing (like, she knows the difference between stays and jumps, that clothes are going to fit differently with them, and that stomachers are a thing), but there are these little things that don't bother me, it's just that I notice them and it's funny to me.

Like, she wants to show that Bella used to be frivolous, so she says that she never had to make decisions more stressful than how to trim a bonnet. Which isn't impossible, but with 18thc bonnets there just isn't that much trimming and it's not as changeable as Regency bonnet fashions. And then later on a guy wraps her up in a shawl.

It's just interesting, insert some academic-sounding line about clothing and the way it affects the way we think and conceptualize the world and the way it gets in our heads.

(There's also the gripe I have that applies to pretty much everyone - referring to a particular dress as the "[color] [fabric]". It's the logic of it. Do you have a dress in two materials for every color for every part of the day? If you don't, do you really need to specify that you want to wear the blue silk to the fabulous ball rather than the blue serge? Or that you're going to go for a long walk in the forest in the grey wool rather than the grey velvet?

OR JUST SAY "ONE" AFTER THE FABRIC, PLEASE.)

I love Boardwalk Empire so much

Margaret is such a badass. A couple of episodes she was bantering with these two politicians who'd just been talking with Nucky about how women were too stupid and uninformed to deserve the vote, and she says, "don't keep what we want from us, or we'll take away what you want - alcohol," and they lol that Prohibition isn't doing that much. And then Nucky starts brushing her off for days when she's trying to get him to get rid of these bootleggers near her house - so she tips off Van Alden and gets all the beer for his St. Patrick's party seized and some of his guests arrested, and is front and center in the crowd when he comes out, making eye contact to let him know YOU DON'T MESS WITH MARGARET.

All the characters are such messes and they all do so many bad things without always being justified by the narrative. Those Darmondys. Jimmy's self-destruction is such a train wreck.