Out With The Cold, In With The Flu!

The holiday season takes months of preparation and expense, but how many people stock up and brace themselves for flu season? Every single one of us at the shop has come down with a cold or the flu over the past few weeks, and now we're all (touch wood!) back to our normal, healthy selves. The picture here is a Victorian advertisement from Old London Cries & Characters, a reprint of a pamphlet we received recently from Alan Pryor of Pryor Publications. If only we'd had a bottle of Owbridge's when we needed it!

Rainy Day Escapes

Winter weather has finally hit Berkeley after a very long autumn. For most of America, winter means snow, but in Northern California we get downpours. Having grown up here, I always get the feeling that Christmas is that much closer once the rains begin.

In a town where the weather stays so nice for most of the year, it can be a treat to be forced indoors for some rainy day activities. One such pastime we promote at Castle in the Air is assembling and playing with paper theatres. For a century Pollock's toy theatres were at the top of the Christmas list for every boy in London, including my father. He collected them back when they were printed uncolored, and he painted them and brought to life daring adventures complete with lightning and cannon-fire effects. He was such an accomplished producer at the young age of 12, that when the BBC visited Pollock's and asked for someone who could perform paper theatre plays on live television, he was chosen for the honor.














New entertainments have edged out DIY theatres, but our friend Alan Pryor has kept the curtains up for Pollock's by reprinting a number of their paper theatre kits which we sell at Castle in the Air. It's amazing to me how scissors, glue, and a bit of imagination can transport me to the land of Aladdin or the quarterdeck of Blackbeard's pirate ship. Who said rainy days were no fun?

"Secondhand Handshakes"

Alan Pryor of the Kent-based Pryor Publications is perhaps the world's foremost preserver and distributor of charming reprints of the pamphlets of yesteryear. Topics common among the Pryor library include history, vintage cookery, courtship, and recreational pastimes like magic lanterns and optical illusions. Alan publishes the works of other authors far more often than his own, but he took pen to paper recently and the resulting pamphlet is destined to become a classic in its own right for its practicality and genius.

Secondhand Handshakes is a booklet small enough to fit in any jacket pocket or handbag, and that's exactly where you should keep your copy, because it acts as a sort of passport to the social world. As Alan writes in the introduction to the booklet, "Few of us ever personally get to meet the great, the good, the famous or indeed the infamous in our everyday lives, though strangely enough we may be a lot closer than we think."

Like an autograph book, Secondhand Handshakes has pages dedicated to recording the handshakes you accumulate during the course of life, with space to write the name of the person you met, the date, and anything noteworthy about the encounter. Turning to the next section in the book, you can enter the handshakes they have acquired, and the handshakes those people have acquired, until you've got a several-generations association with someone you never might get to meet personally. It's amazing how easy it is to populate your pages with popes, presidents, and other world-famous individuals this way!

















Alan gives a graphic example of such a tree of handshakes in the booklet, starting with a Great War-era photograph featuring T.E. Lawrence, the King of Jordan Abdullah I, and other British military officers. Alan then traces a line of meetings across the decades until he comes to a photograph of (then) Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown shaking hands with young entrepreneur Tristan Cowell, followed by a photograph of Cowell meeting Pryor himself.
















Anyone who is more chuffed to having shaken hands with Lawrence of Arabia--albeit five times removed--over shaking hands with the Prime Minister once removed is tops in our book. And just think, we've shaken hands with Alan!

Pirate Map, Death Warrant, New Lease on Life

We got a call from England today. It was Alan Pryor of Pryor Publications, to be exact, calling to congratulate America for voting in our new president-elect, and to make sure we'd received Pryor's latest parcel of treasures. It had arrived, we assured him, and we were most excited about his Pirate Map and Death Warrant.

The map is a reprint from a 17th-century atlas showing Madagascar, which was known then as "The Pirate Island" for its hospitality to buccaneers and its key location on trade routes between India and Europe. Alan's copy was acquired in pristine condition from the National Maritime Museum before undergoing a grueling journey involving spilled coffee and the barbecue grill to achieve its vintage look. The 1722 death warrant appears to have been discovered in a distressed state, and distressed is how one would expect a pirate to feel having this decree read to him.

Pirates have been all the rage in the States for quite some time. Maybe Americans have been identifying with the brigands' feeling of disenfranchisement. After all the uncertainty and hand-wringing leading up to yesterday's historic decision, today we awoke feeling ennobled and empowered. Maybe soon we can start romanticizing more honorable historical figures. None are without their shortcomings, but may we suggest--knights?