u/AdiDraws

1937: Queen Elisabeth Musical Foundation.

1938: Monument to King Albert at the Yser.

1956: Mozart bicentenary.

In September 1979, two French travelers, both over 65, set off from Paris Gare du Nord with Inter Rail Senior passes, a monthly budget of 740 francs each, and a plan to cross 9 countries in 30 days by train.

They came back with 2,000 photographs, a notebook full of postcards, and this: three handmade travel journals, calligraphed in colored inks, with every hotel bill, tram ticket, currency exchange receipt, museum entrance slip, and sugar wrapper still glued exactly where they left it 46 years ago.

The itinerary went through Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern and southern Germany, Brussels, Antwerp, Breda, Arnhem, Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Hanover, Göttingen, Kassel, Würzburg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Passau... before continuing into Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and Switzerland.

The Inter Rail Senior pass had just launched that year. These two were among its very first users.

What gets me is the care that went into this. The city names are hand-lettered in an Art Nouveau style, each one in a different color. The text alternates between a nearly typographic formal hand and a looser travel-diary cursive. Hotel receipts are laid out like design elements. A sugar wrapper from a café in Hanover. A pink admission ticket to the Treasury of Antwerp Cathedral, 10 Belgian francs. A tram ticket from Antwerp, M.I.V.A. line, 1979.

Someone spent months after the trip turning their notes into this. It's not a diary. It's a monument.

These two Colombian stamps depict a map of the Isthmus of Panama: ANTILLAS to the north, PACIFICO to the south, COLON and PANAMA labeled on the map itself.

Both were cancelled in Panama, after Panama declared independence from Colombia in November 1903.

The 50 centavos (brown/red, high value) carries two strikes: a red PANAMA administrative mark and a blue circular datestamp reading COLON / OCT 1906 three years into Panamanian independence, Colombian stamps were apparently still in circulation on the isthmus.

The 5 centavos (blue/pink) carries a pink PANAMA cancel of uncertain date.

What makes these particularly striking is the geographical echo: the two cities named on the map (Panama City and Colón) are precisely the two cities whose cancels appear on the stamps. The cartography and the postal history are literally the same document.

This is also the historical moment of the US-backed separation and the beginning of Canal construction. Colombian stamps, Colombian map, Panamanian cancels, a small philatelic window onto one of the most consequential geopolitical events in the Americas.

I'd welcome any insight on the red "PANAMA 2 CTE" mark tax? transit? and whether the transitional use of Colombian stamps post-1903 in Panama is well documented in specialized catalogues.

This is a 2⅜ Centimos de Peso stamp from Filipinas, issued in the early-to-mid 1890s under the reign of Alfonso XIII, who was still a child at the time, born in 1886 as a posthumous heir.

The engraver is Julia (Bartolomé Maura Montaner's colleague at the Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre in Madrid), whose fine portrait work appears across several Spanish colonial issues of this period. The fractional denomination 2⅜ is characteristic of the Philippine monetary system under Spanish rule and never fails to raise eyebrows.

Spain had controlled the Philippines since 1565. This stamp was in circulation just a few years before the Spanish-American War of 1898, after which Spain ceded the archipelago to the United States for $20 million under the Treaty of Paris. It's one of the last philatelic artifacts of over three centuries of Spanish presence in the Pacific.

A small piece of a collapsing empire.

I want to share something I came across that genuinely stopped me in my tracks.

This is the first edition of Journal écrit à bord de la frégate La Belle-Poule, published in Paris by H. L. Delloye in 1841, written by Emmanuel Baron de Las Cases fils, son of the famous author of the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, who was himself a member of the official French mission sent to St. Helena to repatriate Napoleon's remains in 1840.

The frontispiece:

The lithograph — Napoléon à l'ouverture du cercueil, Sainte-Hélène, 15 octobre 1840, is the one you've probably seen reproduced. What the caption actually says is remarkable: it was drawn "under the eyes and according to the indications" of three witnesses who were present, then engraved by J. Rigo at his workshop at Passage Saulnier 19, Paris.

No artist was in the room when the coffin was opened. The image was reconstructed months later in Paris from verbal descriptions. Which explains something that always bothered me when I looked at it: Napoleon's face doesn't really look like Napoleon.

The eyewitness account (pages 235–239)

This is the part of the book I find most extraordinary. Las Cases fils describes the opening of the coffin in clinical, almost uncomfortable detail, the silk wadding that had detached from the walls of the inner coffin, the white mat skin of the toes protruding through split boot seams, the blue-grey tint of the face, the puffed cheekbones, the doctor pressing the left hand and feeling it yield under his finger.

And then this sentence, which hits differently when you read it in the original:

"C'était bien Napoléon !... Napoléon privé de vie, mais non détruit !... On eût presque dit qu'il était encore à ce dernier jour de sa carrière de travaux et de périls... au premier jour de l'éternité !..."

"It was indeed Napoleon !... Napoleon deprived of life, but not destroyed !... One might almost have said he was still at that last day of his career of labours and perils... at the first day of eternity !..."

General Bertrand, who had lived beside Napoleon through years of exile and was present at the opening, watched with the posture of someone about to throw himself forward. Several men sobbed convulsively. Others stood mute, eyes wet.

The coffin had been open for approximately ninety seconds to two minutes.

A detail nobody talks about:

The book also reproduces the full official correspondence leading to the mission including Lord Palmerston's letter of May 9, 1840 to the Comte de Granville, formally authorizing the transfer of "les restes mortels de Napoléon Bonaparte."

And page 238 quietly reveals something: the opening of the coffin was officially framed as a sanitary precaution for the long sea voyage home. In reality it was a diplomatic workaround, the only way to get British authorization to unseal the coffin at all.

The question that has never been answered

After nineteen years, the body was extraordinarily well preserved, the uniform still readable, decorations in place, the face recognizable. Several historians have noted this is consistent with chronic arsenic exposure, which Napoleon's hair has since confirmed. Arsenic is a powerful preservative.

But a minority of researchers have pointed out genuine discrepancies between the 1821 burial descriptions and the 1840 exhumation observations. The theory that the body may have been substituted has never been definitively disproven, because the tissue sample taken by Dr. Guillard during the exhumation, which is held at Les Invalides, has never been subjected to DNA analysis.

It probably is Napoleon. The number of witnesses alone makes a successful substitution almost logistically impossible. But "almost" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

A rare book that is also a primary historical document, a forensic puzzle, and one of the great set pieces of 19th century European history.

I draw with ballpoint pen in old notebooks picked up at flea markets: address books, pocket diaries, whatever the brocante turns up. The pages already carry their own life: handwritten addresses, errands, phone numbers in obsolete formats. I draw directly into that.

The method is automatic. No sketch, no plan, the pen moves and figures emerge: faces dissolving into machinery, winged figures, composite creatures, cosmological tangles. The lines accumulate until the image closes itself.

What interests me is the friction between the two layers, the bureaucratic texture of a mid-century Parisian life (carrossiers, électriciens, the Bibliothèque Nationale) and whatever the hand produces when left unsupervised. They don't illustrate each other, They coexist.

This volume came through my hands recently and I wanted to share it here because it represents something rarely seen intact : a complete, bound manuscript course in religious instruction, written by hand over four years by a single student.

The title page tells the story in three lines : Cours d'Instruction Religieuse Caroline Mendollet1856–1860. Caroline was a boarder at the Monastère de Sainte-Élisabeth in Paris, a convent school run by the Augustinian Canonesses, which educated daughters of the Catholic bourgeoisie under the Second Empire.

Over four years, she copied, an exhaustive theological curriculum covering three major parts : Dogma (the existence of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Church), Morality (the Decalogue analyzed across 39 numbered lessons, sins, conscience, evangelical counsels), and Means of Grace (the Sacraments, Prayer, the Lord's Prayer, Meditation, the Liturgy across 6 sub-sections). The whole is preceded by a detailed analytical table of contents and followed by a full alphabetical index. The result is approximately 1,700 pages in a single volume.

Each new Analyse (lesson) is dated at the top of the page, so you can follow Caroline's progress in near real time : 11 Octobre 1858, 16 Mars 1859, and so on.

Objects like this rarely survive. Most convent exercise books were discarded, lost, or broken up. The fact that this one was bound suggests it was considered worth preserving from the moment it was completed. A minor monument to patience, faith, and the lost culture of Catholic girls' education in mid-19th century France.

Ephemera from a world that no longer exists: the age of steam-powered warships and the men trained to keep them alive.

Inside: dozens of pages of dense technical manuscript with hand-ruled engineering diagrams in brown ink. This is a training notebook from an élève mécanicien, a student machinist of the French Navy. The Navy had operated dedicated schools for mechanics and stokers since 1861, training the men who would maintain steam machinery aboard warships.

The contents are remarkable in their precision and completeness:

Cross-sections of triple expansion steam engines, with every component labeled: pistons, stuffing boxes, slide valves, connecting rods

Complete boiler circuit schematics, including fuel oil burners, feed pumps, condensers, heaters, propeller shaft assembly, Michell thrust bearings, stern tube details, Valve timing diagrams: Zeuner circles, eccentric geometry, crank angle calculations, Auxiliary machinery: air pumps, bilge pumps, clack valves...

The machines described here were already becoming obsolete when this was written. Steam turbines were taking over. This student trained on the last generation of a technology that had defined naval power for sixty years.

We don't know his name...

A small, quietly extraordinary survival.

Picked this up recently, it's the atlas volume of Embryogénie Comparée by Victor Coste, published in Paris in 1837 a course on the development of man and animals delivered at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris.

Ten lithographs, all drawn from life by Antoine Chazal and printed by Lemercier. The subjects range from human embryology to the sheep, the rabbit, the kangaroo, and the platypus. That last one still feels slightly surreal, the platypus plates are based on Richard Owen's 1834 memoirs, at a time when the scientific world was still genuinely arguing about whether the thing laid eggs or not.

The sheep plates are printed on black grounds with white highlights, technically closer to mezzotint in feel than to what you'd expect from a lithograph. The elongated filiform eggs of the ewe, coiled like pale ribbons against the dark background, look almost abstract. Then a few pages later you get a fully developed lamb embryo, suspended in its membranes, rendered with that quiet precision that 19th century natural history draughtsmen somehow pulled off without photographs or microscope photography.

The kangaroo dissection is extraordinary too, the double uterus fully opened, the tiny fetus visible inside, the whole thing looking more like a botanical illustration than an anatomy plate.

The copy itself came out of a French university library (stamps on the title page).

What strikes me most is how ambitious the project was. Coste was essentially asking: what does life look like across all these radically different creatures, at its earliest stages? The answer, spread across ten large lithographs, is that it looks stranger and more varied than you'd expect and somehow more beautiful for it.

Traité des Feux d'Artifice, où l'on voit… by Amédée François Frézier, Paris, chez Pierre-François Giffart, 1715. "Avec Privilège du Roy." Dedicated to the Prince of Dombes (a legitimized son of Louis XIV).

The book is in three parts: the chemistry of pyrotechnic materials, the making of all types of fireworks, and the orchestration of public "feux de joye." Illustrated with engraved plates showing rockets, aerial shells, Catherine wheels, star clusters, and cross-sections of pyrotechnic devices, all drawn by Frézier himself.

Frézier first published this work in 1706 under a different Paris bookseller (Daniel Jollet) this copy sits in a very precise slot in the publication history: post-original, pre-piracy.

About the author: Frézier (1682–1773) was a military engineer, mathematician, and spy who lived to 91 and never stopped working. He is best known today for his 1714 account of a clandestine survey mission to the Spanish colonies of South America during which, incidentally, he brought back strawberry plants to France, crossing them with Virginia strawberries to produce the ancestor of the modern garden strawberry. The man who gave Europe its fireworks manual also gave it the strawberry.

The title page carries the author's name completed in a contemporary hand "Frezier" added in ink after the printed "Par le Sieur F…" — by an early reader who knew perfectly well who had written it. And on the front paste-down, the same or another hand has copied out, in elegant early 18th-century script, an extended extract from the Journal des Sçavans review of the 1707 original, noting down the reference: "Benard Nouv. 1707, Mars p. 356." Someone bought this book and cross-referenced it against the learned press. That's the kind of provenance that tells you about the culture of reading, not just the culture of collecting.

On the content itself: Frézier is meticulous in a way that feels almost modern. He gives recipes, proportions, timing, failure modes. He discusses why certain compositions produce certain colors (color pyrotechnics were still in their infancy). He distinguishes between fireworks for military use and fireworks for spectacle, and firmly plants his flag in the entertainment camp. The book opens with a chapter on saltpeter and ends with instructions for staging a full royal feu de joye, complete with architectural ephemera (triumphal arches, obelisks) designed to burn.

Three centuries later, it still reads like someone who genuinely loved making things explode in beautiful ways.

Picked up this copy of Dave McKean's Cages (French edition, Delcourt 2000) in Paris.

Didn't notice until I got home what was inside the front endpapers.

McKean drew a portrait directly onto the black page signed and dated 2004 dedicated to Angelo Rinaldi, a prominent French literary critic and member of the Académie française.

Cages is already considered McKean's masterpiece. Finding a copy with an original sketch inside, with a traceable dedication to a notable cultural figure, for €25 in a pile of random books... yeah.

Anyone else have a McKean thrift find story?