Brand-new business cards and wallet are go. Can't wait to release them into the wild for the first time this Friday, 16 May, at #CartoCymru at the #NationalLibraryWales. I'm really looking forward to the conference and the chance to chat about Welsh heritage and contemporary art, to say nothing about looking at some beautiful maps.
A day of launches today. In the morning the staff of the #NationalLibraryWales got an exclusive preview of Peter Lord's humdinger of an exhibition "No Welsh Art" (spoiler: totes Welsh art!) in #aberystwyth and now the evening starts with Andrew Green's new book "Voices on the Path".
Culture vulture in mid #Wales.
Because it's Holy Week and people are gearing up to descend in droves on #Snowdon over the up-coming long weekend, here's a reminder from history that it's not really worth the effort:
"Would I had stayed on level ground
And kept the goblet brimming
For on the top here I have found
nor weeds nor wine nor women
Had I but known, no toil were mine
I never would have so done
Give me my mistress & my wine
The Devil may take Snowdon
F. Thompson Jr.
God bless the girls.
R. R. Blackwell"
Snowdon Visitors’ Books,1863–66, #NationalLibraryWales, p.113
For more disgruntled hilarity by historic tourists, here's a full write-up. #OpenAccess #histodons #Wales #Tourism
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13645145.2022.2063102
Some quick #Bywgraffiadur browsing of the digital holdings of the #NationalLibraryWales and I stumble over a short appreciative bio of my fellow-#German, Prof Hermann Ethé. He was a leading scholar of #MiddleEast languages and manuscripts, most prominently in #Arabic, #Persian and #Turkish, and came to #Aberystwyth, #Wales, to teach German alongside the languages of his actual area of expertise. Within a few weeks of the outbreak of #WWI he was chased out of town by an anti-German mob and died in Bristol in 1917 mostly of a broken heart of having been treated so shamefully. The uni, to their credit, always stood by him and undertook countless appeals to the UK government to gain a pension for Ethé.
We still need to write up his biography in the Dictionary.
Image source: http://hdl.handle.net/10107/5905457
Well, what do you know. The #NationalLibraryWales holds the original drawing volume of illustrations in Cambria Depicta. Apart from being an invaluable compilation of north Wales views around 1800, it is also an interesting source for comparisons between original artworks and their copies produced for mass circulation in print. And as it so happens, Robert Roberts's perilous situation actually looks even more perilous in the original ink #drawing.
#TravelWriting #Wales #Illustration #DigitalCopy #OpenAccess
And there is yet another Asian missionary with a link to #Wales. This is U Larsing, or Larsing Khongwir (1838 - 1863) from the Khasi Hills, Meghalaya, India. He was one of the first from this area to go on a lecture circuit in England and Wales in the 1860s. He died in Caergwrle, Flintshire, during his visit to Britain and was buried in Chester.
John Hughes Morris of Liverpool wrote Larsing's biography, which you can read here courtesy of the #NationalLibraryWales: http://hdl.handle.net/10107/5967792
Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_U._Larsing_(4670373).jpg
Rita Singer