Literature

 17th-century manicule and notes in the margin of translations of Aristotle. Courtesy of the Penn Library.

Filling the Gaps

Notes in the margins of early modern books can be very revealing about their readers’ lives and interests. 

Telegraphers at work, 1908. Library of Congress/Getty.

Love on the Wire

The advent of telecommunications gave rise to a new literary genre through which female telegraphers and writers found social freedoms.

Book sale in the Łódź Ghetto, 1940 © Collection Walter Genewein/akg-images.

The Underground Library

As the Nazis enclosed Warsaw’s Jewish quarter in a ghetto, a librarian set up a secret children’s library. 

Shock and enchant: from The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, 1781. Alamy.

Echo Chamber

Dinner parties in the ‘Revolutionary Age’ with the publisher Joseph Johnson.

Library

Libraries for All

Early modern parish libraries, frequently established for the benefit of the general public, were often deliberately inaccessible.

Colonel Nasser (left) and General Naguib at a press conference, 1953.

The Strange Death of Liberal Egypt

For most Egyptians the country’s independence came with the revolution of July 1952, not with the end of the British protectorate in February 1922. Yet, as the experiences of three patriotic writers show, independence did not mean freedom.