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History Today's blog (URL below) is running a profile on a series of racey, humorous caricatures from the mid to late 1700's. The November issue of the journal History Today features 'The Other Cheek', and authors Colin Jones and Emily Richardson reveal who a little-known collection of obscene and irreverent caricatures targetting Madame de Pompadour from a book of drawings entitled the Livre de caricatures tant Bonnes que mauvaises. Many of the drawings are a little--well, what should I say? They reflect French humor of the time (the image posted here is very tame compared to many of them). You can see them all here: http://www.historytoday.com/colin-jones/madame-de-pompadour-other-cheek The cartoonist, one of Madame Pompadour's contemporaries, told it like he saw it, that's for sure. The 'Book of Caricatures both Good and Bad' was composed over almost 30 years from the 1740s to the 1770s. The man responsible for them was Charles-Germain de Saint-Aub...

  Curtis Paper Mill, 1880  In the last post , we took a look at the early years of the paper mill on White Clay Creek just east of Newark, and followed it from its beginnings around 1789 to the departure of the Meeteer family in 1843. However, only those well-steeped in local lore are likely to know the site as Meeteer's Mill, or the Milford Paper Mill. That's because even though the mill seems to have been all but falling down in 1848, after the brief ownership of Joseph Perry, the site was far from finished. In fact, under the name of the new owners, the Curtis family, the site would continue to manufacture high-quality paper for almost another 150 years. It's not known what drew Solomon Minot and George B. Curtis to Delaware, but the brothers from Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts must have seen the potential in the old Meeteer mill. If anyone could, it would be them. Minot (as he was known) and George were two of nine Curtis brothers in the papermaking business, all...

I spent this past weekend in Ashland for the closing weekend of the season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival . Crisp air, gorgeous autumn leaves, snow-capped mountains, lovely time with friends, and a glimpse of three of our own Leslie's books prominently displayed in the Tudor Guild gift shop. And three wonderful plays, all of which I was seeing for the second (or in the case of Measure for Measure the fourth) time. One thing I noticed is that all three plays dealt with theater in a variety of ways. Saturday I saw Ghost Light , a fabulous, wrenching world premiere developed by Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone, written by Taccone, and directed by Moscone, It's a wonderfully theatrical play both in style (moving back and forth in time, combining elements of dream and reality) and in substance, as the central character struggles to come to terms with his father's assassination while directing a production of Hamlet . The scenes of the production team discussing how to han...

The amazing Joanna Bourne is here with us today to talk about her new release The Black Hawk.   She'll also be giving away a copy to one lucky commenter! If you're like the rest of us, you're addicted to Jo's very special world of intrigue, and you're chomping at the bit to read Adrian's story... Attacked on a rainy London street, veteran spy Justine DeCabrillac knows only one man can save her: Hawker, her oldest friend . . . her oldest enemy. London's crawling with hidden assassins and someone is out to frame Hawker for murder. The two spies must work together to find who's out to destroy them... Black Hawk is set during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.  That's  from 1794, running to 1818.   Is there any particular reason you chose these years?   How did you become interested in this time period? What you love about it? Romance genre was my gateway drug to the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century.  I'll point to Georgette...

Curtis Paper Mill, c.1915 Way back, in one of the first posts on this site, we looked at the Meeteer House on Kirkwood Highway, just east of Newark. Now, we'll focus on the source of the Meeteer's wealth, briefly mentioned in the earlier post -- their paper mill. First built during the early years of our nation, rebuilt twice and upgraded numerous times over the years, high-quality paper was produced at this site almost continuously for over two hundred years. When production finally ceased here in 1997, the Curtis mill was the oldest operating paper mill in the country -- and that was the one built halfway through the site's history! Although the final years of the mill are well-documented and remembered, the details of its beginnings are a bit hazier. What we do know is that in 1789, Thomas Meeteer of Birmingham Township, PA purchased land on the east and north sides of White Clay Creek from Samuel Painter, Jr. Though there are no direct references to a paper mill bein...

Gauchos were the residents of the South American pampas or Patagonian grasslands, found in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Chile and Southern Brazil. Loosely, the word is the South American equivalent of “cowboy,” ( vaquero in Spanish), and, like that of his North American counterpart, it’s mostly a 19th century term. Theories as to origins of the gaucho vary. The term may derive from the Mapuche cauchu (“vagabond”) or the Quecha huachu (“orphan”). The first recorded uses of the term date from the time of Argentine independence in 1816. At one time, gauchos made up most of the rural population in Argentina, herding cattle and practicing hunting in addition to serving as guerrilla fighting forces. Cattle came to the pampas from Paraguay in 1580. In the 18th century, the gauderios , who lived by hunting wild cattle, were recorded by the travel writer Alonso Carrio de la Vandera when he passed through northern Argentina. Commercial cattle ranching began in the second half of the 1...

Not so very long ago, my editor's assistant called with a question from the copyeditor. In The Orchid Affair , my modern character, Eloise, makes a joke to her boyfriend about "Sit, Boo Boo, sit! Good dog." Did I mean "sit, Ubu, sit"? Or was it something else entirely? Well, it was and it wasn't. It was really a reference to that old tv bit, "Sit, Ubu, sit" (does anyone else remember this?), but Eloise, being Eloise, had misheard it and thought it was Boo Boo, because that's the sort of thing Eloise does. It's a good thing she has lots of reference works in her professional career as a historian, because in daily life, she's constantly mis-hearing, mis-quoting, and mis-remembering. Not like I'm drawing this from personal experience or anything. This little interchange did get me thinking, though. Is there a higher standard of accuracy for fiction? In our false world, must our facts be more true? In real life, people get th...