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...