Something About Self-Referential

Celebrating self-references.

Something About a Life in Miniature

Make room for dolly.

Something About Warren Windrow

Hare be rows.

Something About #BobMontana

Archie Deluxe!

Playing the Torturer, By Small and Small

 

The notion of memorializing a crime in miniature caught our eye this Sunday morning, if only because it reminded us of the dollhouse room in the Childermass Clock, itself a rather macabre monument to Childermass family secrets.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are a series of intricately-designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962), a pioneer in forensic science.  Glessner Lee used her inheritance to establish a department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1936, and donated the first of the Nutshell Studies in 1946 for use in lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966, the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland, where they are on permanent loan and still used for forensic seminars.  The 2012 documentary "Of Dolls and Murder" celebrates Glessner Lee and her creations, the latter of which were the focus of a story on CBS-TV's Sunday Morning.

Proof Reading: 6 Misspelling of "Sorcerer's Skull"

John Bellairs wrote books and humor articles, Brad Strickland has written books, radio plays, poetry, and more - and they've all misspelled their fare share of words.

What title has seen the most misspellings? We'd wager The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull (1984). Here are six ways other people have written the title over the years.

What's What: Magna Carta

Professor Childermass boasts that the name Childermass is "ancient and honorable" with one of his ancestors alongside the barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta [The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull, 9].

Bellairs-Related Gorey Artwork At Auction

Right off the bat this year we have news of a forthcoming auction that includes some gems created by Edward Gorey.  Goreyana reports the auction on January 22, 2015 at Swann Galleries in New York City features three pieces of original art by Edward Gorey, two of which have ties to the Bellairs corpus of books.

Who's Who: Seth Thomas

Finnick’s Clock Museum in Vinalhaven boasts a number of varieties of clocks and timepieces, including some by this well-known clockmaker [The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull; 103].

Where's There: Cemetery Island

Described as "just a dot on the map out in Hurricane Sound, not far from Vinalhaven," this island on the southeastern coast of Maine was home to Warren Windrow in the 1840s [The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull; 125].

BiblioFile: eReads Artwork

Johnny Dixon and Edward Gorey will always be connected because of John Bellairs’s three series of young-adult adventures, only one had the same artist for the entire run of American hardcover editions. The Barnavelt series has had five different illustrators and there were two for the Monday series, but Gorey created the wraparound dust-jacket art for all twelve Johnny Dixon books published between 1983 and 1999. Because of that there is a certain consistency to their look when the novels are displayed end-to-end. (Some people do that, we’re told.)

Time Capsule: Feb. 1952

February, 1952: Come one, come all! Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire beckons you to visit the quintessential New England village, complete with the prominent town common and twelve surrounding homes all on the National Register for Historic Places.

Alert: Johnny Dixon & SF Gateway

In what probably will be our last post for 2011, we make note of yet another round of Bellairs e-books. Yes, we mentioned the American editions published by eReads earlier this summer and now we’re pleased to pass word along about the UK counterparts.

Alert: Johnny Dixon & eReads

We often wonder what John’s reaction would have been to the Internet (to Wikipedia, to YouTube, to iSchtuff, and even the CompleatBellairs) and the rise of mobile electronic devices.

For someone who wrote a celebration of olfaction by describing a book as smelling like Old Spice talcum powder (and adding that “books that smelled that way were usually fun to read” [The House with a Clock in its Walls; 19]), it might be unfathomable for a book to exist without smells, without textures, without the chance of paper cuts, and without...well...paper.

'Tis Fitz We Understand

The prefix Fitz- is an old word for "son of", especially used for the illegitimate sons of royalty.  Bear that in mind as we lay out this factoid.

We recently came across this exciting book, A Descriptive Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum, by Montague Rhodes James (yeah, that M. R. James). The Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge and was founded in 1816 with the bequest of the library and art collection of the 7th Viscount FitzWilliam.

Goreyana: Weatherend & Spell

Notes from Goreyana about The Dark Secret of Weatherend and The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull:

Bibliofile: 遺書と地下聖堂

We were going through the archives this weekend and we came across our Japanese file, which turned out to only be a few notes about the Japanese editions of the books published a few years ago.

Sorcerers vs. Wizards?

Something caught our eye about the definition of a sorcerer verses a wizard, albeit in a D&D setting:

Strange Maine

Founded in 2005, the blog Strange Maine documents some of the odder things happening in the Pine Tree State. John Bellairs wrote of some weird happenings in Maine in The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull, particularly some spooky happenings in Vinalhaven. Michelle Souliere notes the book is one of her favorites as well, plus passes along a story about some recent events in Vinalhaven:

Go with the Green

Happy St. Patrick’s Day – and to celebrate, here’s a portion of the hymn Father Higgins taught us, St. Patrick’s Breastplate. Patrick is supposed to have composed this in his preparation for this victory over Paganism.