All the world’s a stage

HSP has a large collection or programs, playbills, and other ephemera from Philadelphia’s Academy of Music (once called the American Academy of Music), dating from its beginnings in the late 1850s to the late 20th century.  The collection was recently adopted and is my current processing project.  Though I’ve barely scratched the surface (having just [...]

Read Full Post »

Memoirs of HSP Printing Proofs

There are few things in conservation work that excite me more than a substantial transformation of an item.  When I pulled out the bundles of dingy paper from an old box, it was exciting to envision them clean, flat and arranged neatly in folders! The three bundles were bound in groups of roughly 100 sheets [...]

Read Full Post »

Won’t you step into this cloud of steam?

Surely steam-powered travel was not in Peter Gabriel’s mind when he wrote his 1992 song Steam. But cutting edge travelers of 1869 may have been eager to step into (or rather, sit behind) the cloud of steam produced by the one, the only…”The Wonderful Steam Man!” While going through a few boxes of uncatalogued graphics, [...]

Read Full Post »