M.J. Rose

We think an entire novel could be written around such an intriguing object!

Thou’rt poisoned with that book

from the delightful blog: Shakespeare’s England: Everyday Life In Seventeenth Century England

“I wanted to share this fascinating object which I stumbled upon on Friday. It is a bible dating to 1600 which contains a secret arsenal of poison. Given its nature, one might assume it was used by travelling assassins, or kept hidden in the library of a large house to dispatch unwanted guests. It was for auction at the Hermann Historica auction house in Germany, and is described, in translation, as follows:

Original book cover in 1600 with finely embossed parchment-related covers. Close book intact, the pages glued to a solid block, and cut out rectangular. Inside, finely crafted device with eleven different sized drawers and an open compartment. The individual drawers with colored paper glued on, the front frame and knobs flame strips of silver and ebonised wood. Handwritten paper labels with the Latin names for various poisonous plants…”

Click here to visit the original post at Shakespeare’s England, Everyday Life In Seventeenth Century England. (Several more beautiful photos of this object are to be found.)

Or perhaps these houses are very much alive as secret histories, waiting to be read?

(The following is one of the most intriguing introductions to a new novel that we have seen…)

Man Explores Abandoned Untouched Homes In Europe

“Author Ransom Riggs wanted to make sure the setting for his upcoming novel was true to life, so he travelled to Europe to find the kind of houses that were described in the pages of his book. When he stepped into these abandoned homes, he discovered something he never expected to see. Some of these homes, empty for decades, were completely undisturbed. If not for the thick dust coating everything, it’d be as if they were still lived in. Trinkets from a time long past littered the inside.

Riggs teamed up with urban explorer/photographer Martino Zegwaard to photograph and document the inside of these homes. His intention was to show that these homes aren’t rotting wastes of space, they’re visual histories of the people who lived there…”

For the rest of the article, click here. For the video, see below.