#gulliver bartlett

[strawberryamanita]

Wilford, WarfPat and Gulliver Bartlett as the fucking PowerPuff Girls

[ninja-muse]

The Aud Book Photo Challenge, Day 30 - September Wrap-up

Birthday haul

The Rosicrucian Enlightenment - Frances A. Yates

1491 - Charles Mann

Dictionary of G— Mythology - Claude Lecouteux

three homemade booksleeves

CDs: Now It’s Called Princeton, A Young Man from Canada, The Green Fields of Canada, all by Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat

Funkopops of Marko and Alanna from Saga

four miniature Giant Microbes of Cambrian explosion fauna

the Death Note DVD set, not pictured

Read this month

Chase Darkness With Me - Billy Jensen

Well Met - Jen DeLuca

Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters

Three Men on the Bummel - Jerome K. Jerome

Ms. Marvel, Vol. 5 - G. Willow Wilson

Daisy Jones and the Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid

Currently reading: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

[inexpensiveprogress]

My Pictures for Schools

 Chloe Cheese - Tea and Cake (In My Collection)

This is a post about the Cambridgeshire County Council Pictures For Schools Collection. It was a brave project founded in 1947, in part as a reaction to the brutalities of the war, but also to brighten up classrooms and schools with modern works of art and improve the minds of young children. 

I am apt to using the word utopian a lot, but personally I believe projects like these were important in rebuilding Britain after the war. Not just bringing art into the home, but taking it to the public spaces; from the windows in Coventry Cathedral to the Festival of Britain, there was a manufacturing ‘brave new world’ of Britain and they used the artists as part of the team, maybe from champions of design like Robin Darwin at the Royal College of Art and exhibitions like Britain Can Make It in 1946.

The driving force behind the Pictures for Schools project was painter and educator Nan Youngman, art adviser to Cambridgeshire’s Director of Education, Henry Morris. Youngman was a student of painting at the Slade from 1924-1927, winning a prize at the Slade in 1926. She painted still, but focused on education for most of her life. 

The ideas motivating Pictures for Schools were very much of their time. During and after the Second World War, as the rebuilding of Britain was debated in both the public and political spheres, educators called for art education to be given a central position in the new school system. This received support from the Ministry of Education, as part of a project to promote British culture, improve the public’s standards of taste and create a new generation of citizens and educated consumers who were capable of exercising judgement in aesthetic matters and making informed choices and purchases.

The Pictures for Schools project came out of and alongside many other famous ‘utopian’ projects like the Contemporary Lithographs (1937-38), AIA Everyman’s Prints (1940) and the School Prints series of lithographs where major artists would be paid to design a lithograph that would be printed in thousands and then sold to schools cheaply. Youngman was involved in the Everyman’s Prints series and it may have helped inspire the running of Pictures for Schools.

In the founding of the Pictures for Schools project, one of Youngman’s big successes was after she accompanied Morris to London in 1945 to buy a painting by L.S.Lowry from the Lefevre Gallery for 30gns for the Cambridge Schools Art Collection as part of Pictures for Schools. At the start of a recession in 2009 the Cambridge County Council sold it for £541,250 at Christie’s. The commission on that sale would have been around £125k.

 L. S. Lowry - A Market Place, Berwick-upon-Tweed, 1935

The rest of the works were due to go up for sale with Christie’s too, some of the works I own still have catalogue assignment stickers from the auction house on the back, but with the economic climate the Cambridge Council pulled the collection from auction and in 2017 they would come up again for sale with another auction house.

Although Nan Youngman was the organiser and originator of Pictures for Schools, she had the support of long-running exhibition secretaries, who themselves had interesting backgrounds and careers.

Slade-trained painter and writer Sylvia Pollak was the first Organising Secretary. She had, like Youngman and many of their circle, links with the Artists’ International Association and the Women’s International Art Club.

She was succeeded by art historian, writer and lecturer Alison Kelly, who had a particular interest in furniture and pottery, from 1950-1957, when she resigned to spend more time lecturing... During the war, Kelly had been flown around the country working on camouflage schemes for possible bombing targets such as factories.

Katharine Baker, who had been treasurer for the Society for Education through Art, took over from 1958-1967. She had previously worked for the British Institute for Adult Education, which during the war organised good design exhibitions, put pictures in air raid shelters, armed services establishments and British Restaurants, and sent exhibitions to outlying districts. She received a New Year’s day MBE in 1948 for her work on the ‘Art for the People’ travelling exhibitions.

Finally, Joan Bartlett was Organising Secretary from 1967 until after the exhibitions’ close in 1969, when the exhibitions were held at the Royal Academy’s Diploma Galleries.

 Stephen Bone - Yachts Racing at Loosdrecht, (In My Collection)

The Stephen Bone painting above was bought direct from the artist himself as on the back are various notes and bills on Bone’s headed paper.

Youngman donated some of her paintings and linocuts to the collection, other artists in the collection are like a who’s who of British Art. Gertrude Hermes, Richard Bawden, John Piper, Anthony Day, Patrick Hughes, Enid Marx, Michael Rothenstein, Malvina Cheek, Robert Tavener, Julia Ball, Peter Nuttall, Richard Beer, George Chapman, Alistair Grant, Edwin La Dell, Rosemary Ellis, Tirzah Garwood and Evelyn Dunbar are but a few.

 Nick Lyons - Between You and Me, 1977 (In My Collection)

As the Pictures for Schools scheme ended in the 1960s, in Cambridge the project continued under the name ‘Original Works for Children in Cambridgeshire’.

 Malvina Cheek - Cornstooks at Furlongs, 1962 (In My Collection)

The Malvina Cheek drawing above came with some provenance. 

I was staying at Furlongs when I drew the Corn Stooks . It was then a magical place, a shepherds cottage set in the shadow of the Downs. A gap in the wall leads up to the Downs. There was no electricity, no gas, only oil lamps and wood fires; a telephone the only concession to modern life.

In the fields alongside the cottage were pyramids of corn. The exciting shapes of the corn stooks attracted me. There was only time to draw, my daughter was very young, so I made studies hoping to develop them later. I also drew Dick Freeman, the farmer from whom Peggy leased her part of the cottage; he used an adjacent room where he rested after tending his sheep. There was always a pleasant speaking voice, a fine hooked nose and large hands like those in a Permeke drawing. Later I would use both the drawings of corn stooks and of Dick the farmer, I was commissioned to illustrate Gulliver’s Travels

Cheek also worked as part of the Recording Britain project.  

 Bernard Cheese - The Lemon Seller (In My Collection)

Walter Hoyle the Great Bardfield artist took over the scheme in the 1970s. Hoyle donated a few pictures and convinced other artists to donate works to the project too. Hoyle came to be involved as he was working at the Cambridge School of Art, now part of the Anglia Ruskin University. He would teach printmaking in the St Barnabas Press, a premises that the art school rented and he would encourage his pupils to donate a print to the collection. It may also explain how a fellow Bardfield artist, Bernard Cheese gets into the collection. Hoyle retired from teaching in 1985, moving from Cambridge to Hastings and Dieppe. 

 Warwick Hutton - Adam and Eve, 1986 (In My Collection)

We know the Original Works for Children in Cambridgeshire continued until 1985 when the project was run by the council and in the mid 1990s, the Council wound down the project citing the expenses of transporting the art around, hanging and administration costs and the works were stored in a shed outside Huntington Library and in a community centre in Papworth for the next 15 years.

The works by Walter Hoyle and Warwick Hutton in the collection were given with expenses for framing to the artists. Warwick Hutton’s painting of ‘Adam and Eve’ followed with a book he published in 1987 under the same name by Hutton with Atheneum Books.

 Poul Webb - Petersfield (In My Collection)

Many of the works that Hoyle encouraged his students to make were prints, Poul Webb remembered making the print above in various colourways to me when I contacted him and he now works mostly as a painter with a totally different style. The picture below by Glyn Thomas is unlike his style now too, he works in drawings and etchings but Hoyle must have been an interesting man to work under as many of the artworks have a bit of Rothenstein or Bawden in them, I guess due to the Bardfield connections.

 Glyn Thomas - Corn Exchange, Cambridge, 1965 (In My Collection)

It wasn’t just Bernard Cheese and Walter Hoyle that had works in the collection from Great Bardfield. Tizah Garwood had a painting in the collection of two donkeys. Chloe Cheese also had two prints in the collection.

 Tirzah Garwood - Nathaniel and Patsy

 Chloe Cheese - Figs and Coffee, 1972 (In My Collection)

 Norma Jameson - Black Cockerel (In My Collection)

 Marion Crawford - Agriculture (In My Collection)

[bookclub4m]

In our one hour and 22 minute long Best of 2016 episode we talk about our favourite reads from the past year, what it even means for a book to be “best”, how we are not very good at tracking our reading, and what to read when you’re on painkillers. [Our apologies for the sound quality (as usual), someday we’ll get everything to work perfectly.]

You can download the podcast directly, find it  on Libsyn, or get it through iTunes or your favourite podcast delivery system. Plus! We're now on Stitcher and Google Play!

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jessi 

Favourites from things we read for the Book Club

Fiction

Anna: His Majesty’s Dragon - Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik (Historical Fantasy)

Runner up: A Short History of Indians in Canada: Stories by Thomas King (Aboriginal/Indigenous/First Nations)

Jessi: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (Historical Fantasy)

Matthew: The Girl With Ghost Eyes by M.H. Boroson (Historical Fantasy)

And Ride a Mule the short story set after the novel

Runner up: The excerpt of Red Spider White Web by Misha Nogha from Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (Aboriginal/Indigenous/First Nations)

Meghan: Your Republic is Calling You by Young-Ha Kim, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Spies/Espionage)

Runner up: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (Historical Fantasy)

Runner up: Godless but Loyal to Heaven by Richard Van Camp (Religious Fiction)

Non-Fiction

Anna: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed (Self Help)

Jessi: Ghosts: A Haunted History by Lisa Morton (Paranormal/Supernatural Non-Fiction)

Runner up: National Geographic Ultimate Guide to Supernatural Places: Close Encounters, Haunted Houses, and Other Spooky Hot Spots Around the World by Sarah Bartlett (Paranormal/Supernatural Non-Fiction)

Matthew: Corporate Spies: the Pizza Plot (article) by Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry (Spies/Espionage)

Meghan: Yurei: The Japanese Ghost by Zack Davisson (Paranormal/Supernatural Non-Fiction)

Runner up: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Aboriginal/Indigenous/First Nations)

Favourites from everything else

[We cheated so bad that we had to split Fiction favourites into Prose and Comics.]

Fiction (prose)

Anna: Marked in Flesh by Anne Bishop (and the entire The Others series)

Jessi: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Matthew: Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

Meghan: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

Fiction (comics)

Anna:  Rat Queens, Vol. 1: Sass & Sorcery by Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch

The new series of Rat Queens comes out March 1st

Article about Roc Upchurch (the original artist on Rat Queens) being arrested for domestic violence

Jessi: This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

Matthew: Paper Girls, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Meghan: Yowamushi Pedal, Go! Vol. 1 by Wataru Watanabe

Non-Fiction

Anna: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary by Alain de Botton (and a bunch of his other books)

Jessi: On the Farm by Stevie Cameron

Matthew: Adulthood Is a Myth (Sarah's Scribbles) by Sarah Andersen (an internet monster)

Meghan: My Body Is Yours: A Memoir by Michael V. Smith

Other books mentioned

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Wikipedia)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Wikipedia)

United States of Delirium: The Race Across America by David Houghton

Sensuous Science Fiction from the Weird and Spicy Pulps edited by Sheldon Jaffery

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Recommended)

The Birth of Kitaro by Shigeru Mizuki

Princeless, Vol. 1: Save Yourself by Jeremy Whitley and Mia Goodwin

Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra

Runaways, Vol. 1: Pride and Joy by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

Eyeshield 21, Vol. 1: The Boy With the Golden Legs by Riichiro Inagaki and Yusuke Murata (Canada is shown to have lost to Germany 63-0 at the beginning of chapter 313) (Recommended)

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier

“Raina Telgemeier’s ‘Ghosts’ has a 500,000 copy first printing”

United States of Delirium: The Story of the Race Across America by David Houghton was the book about endurance cycling that Meghan mentioned.

Links and Other Things

Reading 500 Graphic Novels in a year

“DragonForce are a British power metal band” (Wikipedia)

Ju-on: The Grudge (Wikipedia)

The Ring (Wikipedia)

Six-day bicycle racing  (Wikipedia)

Akihabara (the “otaku” district of Tokyo) (Wikipedia)

The Best and Worst Manga panel Matthew went to at San Diego Comicon

Questions

How do you define “best”?

What were your favo(u)rite reads of 2016?

What are your favo(u)rite “best of” lists?

Check out our Pinterest board and Tumblr posts for all our favo(u)rite books we read in 2016, follow us on Twitter, and join our Facebook Group!

Join us again on Tuesday, January 17th, when we discuss Coming-of-Age books!

[strawberryamanita]

It's prolly the most obvious and glaring observation I can make, and I'm sure most of us won't even find it funny... but I'm saying it anyway.

Gulliver Bartlett is a Warfstache don't @me

[strawberryamanita]

Yes!!!!! We count all Warfstaches here! 💟💟💟

Walter Melone watching this video like

[ninja-muse]

Read in 2019 Masterpost

Italics = 7-8 out of 10; Bold = 9-10 out of 10; Struck = unreviewed; * = in home library

Fantasy

Lies Sleeping - Ben Aaronovitch * In an Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire * The Kingdom of Copper - S.A. Chakraborty The Wolf in the Whale - Jordanna Max Brodsky Treason of Hawks - Lila Bowen That Ain’t Witchcraft - Seanan McGuire * A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery - Curtis Craddock Magic For Liars - Sarah Gailey Storm of Locusts - Rebecca Roanhorse Blood of Tyrants - Naomi Novik * Blood Engines - T.A. Pratt Middlegame - Seanan McGuire The October Man - Ben Aaronovitch Grave Importance - Vivian Shaw The Unkindest Tide - Seanan McGuire The Secret Commonwealth - Philip Pullman

Rereads

Discount Armageddon, Midnight Blue-Light Special, Half-Off Ragnarok, and Pocket Apocalypse by Seanan McGuire *

Making Money, Unseen Academicals, Snuff, and Hogfather by Terry Pratchett *

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett *

Broken Homes, Foxglove Summer, and The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch *

DNF The Vampire Files, Volume Five - P.N. Elrod * DNF The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow

Science Fiction

Mutiny at Vesta - R.E. Stearns Bellwether - Connie Willis * Blindsight - Peter Watts * Ringworld - Larry Niven * The Nobody People - Bob Proehl Fortuna - Kristyn Merbeth

DNF A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - Becky Chambers DNF Space Opera - Catherynne M. Valente

Young Adult

Our Dark Duet - Victoria Schwab Hello Girls - Brittany Cavallaro and Emily Henry Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens - Tanya Boteju The Princess and the Fangirl - Ashley Poston Night of Cake and Puppets - Laini Taylor

DNF Dread Nation - Justina Ireland

Graphic Novels

Rivers of London, Vol. 6 - Ben Aaronovitch * America, Vol. 1 - Gabby Rivera * Shades of Magic, Vol. 1 - V.E. Schwab Moonstruck, Vol. 2 - Grace Ellis West Coast Avengers, Vol. 1 - Kelly Thompson The Prince and the Dressmaker - Jen Wang Ms. Marvel, Vol. 5 - G. Willow Wilson * The Unwritten, Vol. 7 - Mike Carey * Rivers of London, Vol. 7 - Ben Aaronovitch *

Middle Grade

From Night Owl to Dogfish - Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer The Shepherd’s Crown - Terry Pratchett *

Rereads

Wintersmith and I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett *

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett *

Romance

A Princess in Theory - Alyssa Cole Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston A Duke by Default - Alyssa Cole Well Met - Jen DeLuca My Fake Rake - Eva Leigh Once Ghosted, Twice Shy - Alyssa Cole •

Mystery

Murder Lo Mein - Vivien Chien Wonton Terror - Viven Chien The Alienist - Caleb Carr *

Other Fiction

Aces Abroad - George R.R. Martin, ed. * The Two Gentlemen of Verona - William Shakespeare * The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters - Balli Kaur Jaswal The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid A Bend in the Stars - Rachel Barenbaum Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters Three Men on the Bummel - Jerome K. Jerome Daisy Jones and the Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded - Ann and Jeff Vandermeer * Amberlough- Lara Elena Donnelly The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett •

Rereads

Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift

DNF - City of Girls - Elizabeth Gilbert DNF - Donna Has Left the Building - Susan Jane Gilman DNF - Less - Andrew Sean Greer

Poetry

Monster Verse - Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust, ed. * The Complete Poems - John Donne

History

How to Be a Victorian - Ruth Goodman * How to Be a Tudor - Ruth Goodman David Bowie Made Me Gay - Darryl W. Bullock Heart of Europe - Peter H. Wilson *

True Crime

Death in the Air - Kate Winkler Dawson Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann Chase Darkness With Me - Billy Jensen The Kill Jar - J Reuben Appelman

Other Non-Fiction

Twisted Tales from Shakespeare - Richard Armour Because Internet - Gretchen McCulloch The Survival Guide to British Columbia - Ian Ferguson In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond - John Zada * Giants, Cannibals and Monsters - Kathy Moskowitz Strain * The Curious Cures of Old England -Nigel Cawthorne *

Rereads - The Science of Discworld III by Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart *

Skimmed for research

Songs of the Pacific Northwest by Jon Bartlett and Phil Thomas

Dead Horse on the Tulameen - Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat

Ask a Queer Chick - Lindsay King-Miller

Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy in Art - Matilde Battistini

Total First Time: 75 Total Rereads: 17 Total Skimmed: 4 DNFs: 8