[gallery] cafeinevitable:

Reading by Eleni Kalorkoti

[gallery] freakyfauna:

The Wrexham coverlet by James Williams (completed in 1842.

Found here and here.

[gallery] The art of Victoria Crowe, whose amazing work I just discovered.

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Gian Paolo Panini Villa Albani, Rome 18th century Morgan Library, New York

[gallery] Mr. Silva of Libreria Books said β€œan old-fashioned space” is clearly appealing to book lovers. He said his shop has had twice as many customers as anticipated, with visitors from as far afield as Australia and China. Confronted with a bookshelf curated by the popular new mayor or surrounded by first editions, who wants to download a morning full of emails?

(via London Bookstores Go Rogue as No Wi-Fi Zones - The New York Times)

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test. Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, β€˜See! this our fathers did for us.’
The Seven Lamps of Architecture, by John Ruskin. I am deep into Ruskin at the moment, so fair warning: there could be a good many quotations from him in the coming days.

God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labor of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have labored for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

[gallery] paperholm:

Paperholm group 8.

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bibliotheca-sanctus: Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland

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[gallery] β€œHawes Water,” Henry George Alexander Holiday, about 1859, at the V&A