A little more like normal

I'd expected this week to be a bit scrappy like the previous two but life at Moncur towers has settled down again, with a couple of afternoons working in the garden in the unseasonably warm weather. (Not only have I been wearing shorts, the strawberries have started fruiting for the third time this year!)

The only trouble is that while it's been warm and sunny, it's also been dry - the soil in the garden is really really dry, which is going to be a problem in a week or two when gets time to start planting our winter veg. 

Mornings are still cold and chilly though as I discovered when I went for a bike ride just after dawn earlier this week

and while it's nothing amazing, I'm quite pleased with my performance.

Up at the Athenaeum, I'm done with prayerbooks for the moment and am back working on the historic book collection. Nothing remarkable this week, mostly crime and romance novels from either the interwar period or the 1950s.

Other than a couple of bodice rippers with bookplates from the Victorian Railways Institute Library, all the books this week seem to have been purchased direct from booksellers, which perhaps reflects the declining popularity of circulating libraries.

And I've been spending my money again on old nineteenth century postcards.

This weeks purchase is an 1896 postcard from Durban, in what was then the British colony of Natal, and is now the largest city in KwaZuluNatal in South Africa

very much a standard colonial pattern postcard of the time designed for international use - hence the 'Unione postale universelle' strapline above the name of the colony.

It's addressed to a Mr R Stanton, 22 Royal Arcade Sydney.

Now vanished - it was demolished in 1969 - the Royal Arcade ran between George Street and Pitt Street near the former School of Arts

I havn't transcribed the message yet, that will be a task for a wet afternoon, but I can share that the card was sent from 80 Alice Street in Durban.

Alice Street has been renamed Johannes Nkosi Street and has been through some changes over the years and is now the site of a major transport interchange. A very quick search has not revealed any photographs of what it looked like in the colonial period, but it was already the site of a major tram interchange around the postcard was mailed...

Still scrappy

 

The weather's been glorious, and as you can see from this picture of our back deck the decidious plants are starting to put on their autumn show.

Lots of bits and pieces making for a very scrappy week, so scrappy that I didn't even manage a bike ride, despite the excellent autumn weather.

Up at the Athenaeum I've finished doing the prayerbooks, something which turned out to be a little more complex than I first thought.

Librarything isn't really set up to handle items where the chief interest is in the ownership and the graffiti in the item and not the item itself.

I ended up creating a simple stub catalogue entry, allocating a temporary call number and typing a free text description of the item and the graffiti into the comment field.

Not ideal, but really we need an asset management solution here rather than a library catalogue.

And just for fun here's the drawing concerned

Most of the rest weren't really that interesting, names and addresses and the like

However, I did have a minor win with last week's shorthand puzzle - the shorthand system used is most likely Dacomb, which dates from the nineteen thirties, and if nothing else helps demonstrate the longevity of prayer books, hymn books and other devotional publications in a less secular age.

I've also been spending my pocket money on some nineteenth century postcards, and this time I've had a win in identifying the recipient.

The actual message is in typescript and from a large department store in Melbourne confirming the despatch of an order via Victorian Railways.

It's interesting in that there is obviously an assumption that the postcard will reach an address in rural Victoria before the order arrives at a small rural railway station...

Scrappy but productive

 This week's been a scrappy but productive week - in between a visit to the eye hospital - nothing serious, last time I had my eyes tested the optometerist noticed that the pressure in my eyes seemed to be going up every year, and it needed to be checked out.

As it was it was nothing serious - my corneas have become a little thicker over the years, and the standard optometrist's test does not allow for this and tends to produce higher than normal readings. Using a more accurate specialist test showed that everying was more or less normal, which was a relief.

My other encounter with the medical profession this week was my annual flu shot - I had it done at the pharmacy in Yackandandah as its usually pretty quiet and anyway it's nice to drive over to Yack to have a coffee in the autumn sunshine - and it is autumn. 

We've hit that point where it flips over from being the tail end of summer to early autumn with chilly mornings and sunny golden days, and on the day I went for an early morning bike ride it was certainly chilly and perhaps time to stop riding in shorts in the mornings.

Workwise, I've started on the prayerbooks at the Athenaeum, as well as doing as much as I can with the story of how a book from a circulating library in Norwich ended up at the Athenaeum.

I also blogged about my discovery of Sir Frizzle Pumpkin, the little known subculture of Edwardian Flappers, and did a little more on the use of Pig Latin to obfuscate messages on postcards in the nineteenth century

In among all of this I've managed two or three afternoons working in the garden, something I find good for my soul, even if I'm not the world's  most competent gardener...

Cataloguing in the dim light of a wet day...

 As expected, there was no power or heating at the Athenaeum this morning.

It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was still dark and overcast, but by strategically positioning myself in front of a window there was enough light to see what I was doing - mostly.

It was cold though and I found myself wrapped up in a fleece jumper and MacPac padded gilet for the first time since last winter.

The good news is that I have now finished all the 'A' shelves and am now ready to move on to the 'B' shelves, however I'm having a little time out to work on a set of donated books that have never been catalogued. 

(not our copy - this one is from the New York Public library via the Hathi trust)

Strangely some of them have cataloguing worksheets and accompanying notes but others completely lack any provenance.

At the same time, once I've done the waifs and strays, I'll deal with the prayerbooks, which are currently uncatalogued before going back to the historic book collection.

As we had no power, there was of course no internet, but my little 4G portable internet modem worked well allowing me to catalogue happily away.

However, as I suspected my old refurbished T440 Thinkpad was a little more of a problem - dating from 2014, I bought it as a refurbished machine when it was already eight years old. It's given excellent service, it's been ultra reliable, but the battery is not what it was - it managed a little under two hours on a full charge - not usually a problem as I usually have it plugged in to a powerpoint.

I'd come prepared and brought along the newer refurbished Acer Travelmate I'd originally bought for J as an alternative to her bigger HP laptop to take to presentations etc.

Well, J never really took to the Acer so I'd prepped it as a possible replacement for my Thinkpad for cataloguing work - as most of the work is done in the cloud via a browser the compute demands are not really that great, and it promised better battery life.

I did think that the smaller screen might be a problem, but it turned out not to be, and certainly battery life was much better, so when I got home after this morning's cataloguing session I swapped out the Thinkpad for the Travelmate in my work bag.

I'll keep the Thinkpad as is for a few weeks until I'm sure that the Acer does its job and then, well I don't know - I've probably got enough Linux machines as it is and the Thinkpad is the same age as the old windows based celeron Thinkpad 11 I keep around to use with Rufus...

Yet another morning bike ride

Well, it's been about six weeks since I last rode my bike - basically since before we went to WA .

Before we went I'd been getting up at around six and setting off in the half dark before sunrise, but the change of seasons meant that I was having to leave later and later to avoid having to ride in the complete dark - outside of the main streets street lighting in Beechworth is fairly minimal.

Since we've had clock change day, sunrise has jumped back to a little after six thirty, meaning I can ride before the tradies trucks start going to jobs, not to mention commuters driving to Wangaratta or Wodonga for work.

So, on a morning threatening rain, I set off. Quite a quiet ride and I was a little slower than I had been before we went on holidays but a decent enough performance only marred by someone reversing out of their driveway without looking, straight in front of me.

It always amazes me that you can have flashing lights on your bike and a hi-vis reflective biking jacket and yet people simply do not register that there's a bicycle coming towards them at 30km/h.

However, no harm done, they (or the autonomous crash avoidance system), did an emergency stop and I swore under my breath and did an avoidance wiggle and carried on avoiding on oncoming ute that had spotted the problem and stopped.

Other than that, I spent an afternoon prepping a backup machine to allow me to catalogue even during Friday's proposed power outage, although I still have my doubts about how successful it will be given the forecast is to be grey and overcast with the occasional shower.

I also got some gardening done, put together a couple of new, additional, compost bins, and spent some time following up on somethings I was working on before we went away on holidays...

Clock change day

 Ah, Easter Sunday and an hour extra in bed as the clocks in the east of Australia went back an hour for winter.

Well, that was the plan, but nobody had told the cats so we were leapt on and meowed at when their morning kibble did not appear at what would have been seven fifteen the day before and is now of course six fifteen.

We held out and ignored them until a bit before seven, before giving up and feeding them.

But of course it underlines just how artificial time and time zones are as a construct.

Before 1895, when standard timezones were introduced in Australia (UTC+8 in the west, +9 in the centre and +10 in the east) time was based on the time in the colonial capital, meaning that Melbourne was roughly twenty minutes behind Sydney, and passengers changing from the NSW railways standard guage train to the Victorian broad guage train had to adjust their watches accordingly.

Given that the trains were pretty slow, it probably made no practical difference, and of course there were no time dependent cross border media.

Later on, South Australia found that being an hour behind Melbourne was inconvenient and changed to UTC +9h30, which again, as no one much lived west of Port Augusta or Port Lincoln really wasn't a problem.

Until October 1916, Ireland used Dublin time which again was round about twenty minutes behind London. Doing so gave people in the west of Ireland a little more light in the mornings, and as the only means of getting to Ireland from the UK was by comparitively slow steamship, the time difference didn't matter that much, there was no radio or tv, and telephones were rarely used for business, and telegrams probably took the best part of an hour to be delivered, possibly longer.

And while most countries had changed to a standard timezone offset - either on the hour or more rarely the half hour  by the nineteen twenties, not all did, with Liberia only changing in 1972.

And until the internet came on the scene, to be honest it probably didn't matter that much.

Clocks and watches had to be changed manually when you crossed timezones and aircraft and train schedules could incorporate an allowance for a timezone change. In the days of mechanical clocks and watches an hour or a half hour shift was easier to deal with than one of 18 minutes of what have you.

With the internet and the need to synchronize and timestamp files things changed.

In fact in the early days of TCP/IP networking in the UK when things were not as reliable as they are today, I used to dread clock change day, with some servers on our NFS based pc network failing to update correctly, requiring a reboot and resync, but then it was only twice a year.

Nowadays, the only reason for lining up on the half hour or hour for our timezone in bureaucratic niceness, the computers, phones and the rest of our booming buzzing electronic confusion could handle wierd time offsets and daylight savings  reliably.

Perhaps just not the cats...

Getting back into it

 Obviously, since we've been away there's been no cataloguing for a month now.

Normally, today would be my day at the Athenaeum, but since today's Good Friday, the Athenaeum is closed.

I'd been planning to get some work done next Friday, but that's suddenly looking a bit iffy with the power company threatening to turn off all of Stanley that day

I could manage without power for a morning by using my portable internet modem, a powerbank, and trusting that the battery in my old Thinkpad holds up for a cataloguing session (actually I could take a second machine as a backup device if needs be) but the problem is the light.

While the Athenaeum has, like a lot of nineteenth century public buildings, tall windows to catch the light (take a look at an old school building or library building to get the idea), there's a possible health and safety issue climbing up and down the ladder if the light's poor, so I guess we'll just have to see what happens on the day - after all the electricity people could decide to postpone the work at the last minute.

Otherwise I've been catching up with some possible leads about Joseph King's cheap circulating library in Norwich.

It's a bit of a puzzle - 1841 is very early for the collection - we have very few books from before the mid 1850s as the Athenaeum was only founded in 1863. 

What we do know is that many books were bought second hand from book importers some of whom bought up stock from failed circulating libraries in the UK.

Did Joseph King simply keep older books among his stock - we'll probably never know, but if we could find out when he was in business we can speculate with a purpose.

The other thing I did was read an interesting paper about coffins in nineteenth century Sheffield. I know it sounds macabre, but often coffin plates are the only way of identifying early goldrush era graves - any wooden grave makers having vanished long ago.

Coffin plates, and other coffin furniture are also potentially interesting. Due to a desire to treat the dead with respect, they were imported from the early days of the Australian colonies

This is an example from Tasmania in 1840, but coffin plates are also among the imported ironmongery advertised in the Sydney Gazette in 1820

meaning that stylistic changes in coffin furniture in England could be used to tentatively date early colonial burials in Australia and New Zealand where no records exist...