Health and Fitness

Muscle Building

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Other Illustrations vintage

Found it!....."Muscle Building" by Mr Liederman (see post for Friday Jan 30th)....read at your peril!

Give the Stays to Grandmother

One of many surreal illustrations included in "A Picture Book for Little Children" (published circa 1812) available for download from the Internet Archive....or view the flipbook online here

Fire across the Tyne

A Record of the Great Fire in Newcastle and Gateshead To which is Prefixed a History of Newcastle ...: ""

A cautionary tale.....

The Fair Concubine Or, the Secret History of the Beautiful Vanella. Containing, Her Amours with Albimarides, P. Alexis, &c. Her Departure from the Court. ... To which is Annexed, The Lady's Last Shift; Or, a Cure for Shame

The Complete Letter Writer

The Complete Letter-writer Containing Familiar Letters on the Most Common Occasions in Life, Also a Variety of Elegant Letters for the Direction and Embellishment of Style, ...

Don't scratch your head when you've got a letter to write, dip into this tome, there's bound to be just the right missive for your purpose......plus, it's a damned entertaining read!

The Castle of Tynemouth - A Tale

Haven't read it yet.....I suspect it may be faintly "Gothic", 1806 style!

The Country Housewife And Lady's Director

The Country Housewife And Ladys Director - Get more Creative Writing

Stories of the Border Marches

This is more a test to find out whether Scribd embed code works than to highlight a book of outstanding literary merit or interest!

Read this doc on Scribd: Stories of the Border Marches by Lang, Jeanie

Hubbub...Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1660-1700

This looks like my sort of book! Limited preview at Google Books, extract below

Paperback will be published at the end of April

A mission statement and a half!

I couldn't resist downloading this book from archive.com. It turned out to to be a bit of a disappointment except for it's stirring 'mission statement', here's just an extract!

"We are anxious to render elegant amusements conducive to the attainment of moral ends; and to lay that foundation of intellectual superiority, and affectionate regard, for the comfort and happiness of others, which can alone give light and animation, sweetness and blooming freshness, to the interesting scenes of future life. All engagements, which are calculated to elevate, soften, and harmonize the human character, have this tendency ; and it is in the assured conviction that the employments here treated of, are, when cultivated in due subordination to higher duties, well adapted to secure these objects, and to promote these domestic ends, that the Ladies' Work-Table Book has been prepared, and is now presented
to the lovely daughters of our land."

Harriet Martineau....late of Tynemouth

"Hey, I know that name" I bet you're thinking

That's because you've seen the English Heritage Blue Plaque on the southern side of Front Street, Tynemouth...well, maybe!
Harriet Martineau was an English authoress and temporary resident in the north......
"From 1839 to 1844 she was an invalid at Tynemouth, but recovered through mesmerism" ......but, hey......didn't we all!
There's lots more about the lady at Wikipedia here
You can download a pdf copy of one of her books "Feats on the Fiords" (with very nice art deco illustrations, one shown above) here at the Internet Archive

Confession.....I've never read anything by the woman....I just liked the pictures!

Another book

Being on holiday this week I've OD'd on radio as usual. On Monday there was a 'piece' on the Cooperative Correspondence Club on Woman's Hour
From the WH website.....
"The writing club that spanned 55 years.
In 1935 a young mother living in Ireland wrote to Nursery World magazine begging for advice on what to do with her free time. She said she was lonely and isolated and needed an occupation that cost nothing. In return, she received dozens of letters from woman all over the United Kingdom who were in similar situations. Together they decided to start a private magazine called the Cooperative Correspondence Club where they could write under pseudynoms about their daily lives. Little did they know they would be writing to each other for more than fifty years.
Now a book has been written about the CCC charting its history from 1935 to its closure in 1990. Jennifer Chevalier has been speaking to its author and to two of the surviving members of the CCC."
“Can Any Mother Help Me?: Fifty Years of Friendship through a Secret Magazine” by Jenna Bailey Published by Faber and Faber ISBN: 0-571-23313-9

Listen to the segment below. You may need to click on the 'Play' button twice, I always have to!

Pitmatic

I get a weekly email newsletter called "World wide words" that's always an entertaining read (it's all about the origins of the words we use in everyday speach, it arrives on a Saturday morning just in time for that first cup of coffee....if you like the sound of it you can register for it here) Anyway, in this weeks issue there was a bit about Pitmatic (see below) and a plug for a book published by Northumbria Uni....thought some of you might be interested....

"PITMATIC

A vernacular used by miners in the north-east of England.

Its name is hardly known even in the area in which it was once best known, though it has received attention from dialectologists and was featured in Melvyn Bragg's The Routes of English BBC Radio 4 series back in 2000. It has been in the news recently as a result of the publication of a book on it by Bill Griffiths.

It was the language of colliers and pitmen, miners in the coal seams of Durham and Northumberland, once the capital of coal (not for nothing was the saying "carrying coals to Newcastle" coined to refer to a useless undertaking). It has gradually died out as the deep pits of the area have progressively closed. Pitmatic is full of mining terms: "at bank", on the surface; "cavil", to choose your underground coal hewing station by lot; "hoggers", footless socks that made it easy to clean coal from between the toes, later a type of flannel drawers; "cracket", a stool on which a pitman sat while hewing coal; "kenner", the end of the shift; and "arse-flap", a loop attached to the winding rope in a shaft on which a man sat while carrying out repairs. Many of the terms can be traced back to Scots, Old Norse and Low German.

Trying to classify it isn't so easy. It isn't a dialect, because it is mainly vocabulary, lacking grammatical features that separate it from other types of speech (the main dialect of the area is the one commonly called Geordie). It isn't just a workplace jargon, though that's where it comes from, because some of the terms have escaped into the wider community, such as "greaser", a device to lubricate the wheels of the coal tubs, which led to the expression "gan canny ower (go carefully over) the greaser", meaning "mind how you go"; It can't be called an argot, which is a semi-secret vocabulary with criminal associations, or a patois, which is a low-status dialect, which Pitmatic certainly wasn't. Call it a vernacular.

The term is first recorded in print, in a slightly different form, in an article in The Newcastle Weekly Chronicle back in 1873:

A great many of the lads, especially from the Durham district, had evidently never been in Newcastle previously, and the air of wonder with which they gazed at the crowds, at the buildings, and especially at the fine folks who occupied the windows, was very amusing. If the quality criticized and quizzed them, the lads returned the compliment, and it was entertaining enough to catch snatches of criticism on the manners and customs of the upper ten thousand of Newcastle, reduced to the purest "pitmatical", shouted across the streets, as the men and lads belonging to collieries swept by where I stood in the crowd...

That fuller form, "Pitmatical", soon abbreviated, gives the clue to its origin. It's a compound of "pit" and "mathematical", which may have been intended to stress the skill, precision and craft of the colliers' work."

[Pitmatic: The Talk of the North East Coalfield, is published by Northumbria University Press, £9.99. ISBN 1-904794-25-4. The book goes well beyond vocabulary to include many examples of songs and stories written in Pitmatic by colliers about pit life and shows how the speech fitted into the wider language-world of the region.]