1. An old French Bank for Sale in the town of Nevers (two hours from Paris)
An intriguing listing (asking price 1 544 000 €). Found on Patrice Besse.
2. Gustave Eiffel’s Swiss Villa Getaway
Villa Claire, named after his daughter, was Gustave Eiffel’s preferred place of rest when he wasn’t building giant iron towers or attempting to engineer the Panama Canal. In Vevey, Switzerland.
From a collection at Musée D’Orsay, prints for sale on Muzeo.
3. An “Internet” Radio, first released in 1954
Nobody knows exactly when the word ‘internet’ was first used, or who coined it, but it appears to have been from 1883 onwards, when it was used as an adjective or verb to describe interconnected motions. It was seemingly first used as a noun in 1977, when demonstrations of the early ARPAD and SATNET networks were held by pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. It wasn’t commonly used by the likes of you and I until the late-1990s, nearly a decade after Tim Berners-Lee developed the thing it actually indicates.
This makes this radio one of the very first proper and public uses of the word internet, and one that predates the development of world-changing thing itself!
The cream case, flat upright format, rounded corners, and ‘screen’-like black tuning display all recall Jonathan Ive’s now legendary design for the iPod. The Internet radio even has white earphones!
Found on Mark Hill Antiques & Collectibles
4. Declassified photos reveal U.S. Army’s Fashion
While scouring the internet some years back for obscure images of foods from the 1970s, Matthieu Nicol, a photo researcher in Paris, happened upon a trove of freely available pictures recently declassified by the U.S. Army. Noting how the clinical coolness of the photos, with their pastel backgrounds and affectless young subjects, resembled so much contemporary fashion photography combined with military functionality, he assembled 350 of them in a new book, “Fashion Army.”
Professionally taken over a decades-long span ending in the 1990s, the images depicted people in uniforms for diverse military use. Yet the original purpose of the photos can only be conjectured, as Nicol explained; despite his efforts, the Army would disclose next to nothing about the collection of some 14,100 images.
Matthieu Nicol’s website is here. Read the full interview with him on The New York Times.
5. On my bucket list
Located in Estes Park, Colorado.
6. This carriage on the Orient Express is such a delight (watch to the end)
View this post on Instagram
7. Log Books
By artist Debra Frances, more of her work here.
8. A 1903 Proposal to Preserve the Dead in Glass Cubes
In 1903, an inventor patented a method of preserving corpses in glass, one of a number of radical inventions that has sought to resist death’s decay.
Found on Hyper Allergic.
9. WWI Soldiers entering a novel billet with their packs. Near Riencourt, France, 1918.
I’m still not sure what a “novel billet” is, but I think they look like “The Borrowers” climbing into a giant can of tinned food for shelter.
Found in the National Archives.
10. Fashion advice from the Sunday Gazette-Mail, 1959
Jeans are out. Dyed moldy green sweatpants are in. Got it.
Found on Yesterday’s Print.
11. An artist just showing off
“The Release from Deception”, by Italian sculptor Francesco Queirolo in 1759, took 7 years to be beautifully and masterfully sculpted. The statue Is located in a church in Naples (southern Italy) called Cappella San Severo, there you can find other two incredibile statues, “il Cristo Velato” by Sanmartino and “la Pudicizia” by Corradini.
Found on Reddit.
12. Anthony Hopkins testing different masks for “Silence of the Lambs”, 1991
Found here.
