User Profile

One of the review quotes on the back describes "Synagogues of Europe" as "encyclopedic", and that's a good word for it. It achieves an impressive balance between breadth of scope and depth of detail, covering synagogues of varying levels of historical and architectural significance, but each with a worthwhile story. The book traces the threads of influence from one building or event to another, and shows how these communal centres reflected the local views about the Jewish community - both their own, and those of the goyim.

The first part of the book explains the relevant basics of Judaism, covers the common features of synagogues and reasoning behind them, and traces the history of Jewish religious buildings from antiquity to the modern day through various influences and trends. The second part describes many specific synagogues, including how they came to be built, their features unique and otherwise, and their legacy. The book makes heavy use of cross-references to provide additional context, which is great, though it can get wearisome if you're reading all the way through.

The illustrations vary in quality. Plans and detailed drawings are included for some buildings and some synagogues have photographs of both exterior and interior, though many are represented by only a mediocre photo or drawing. For the most part, I think the illustrations do their job well, though I'd love to see an edition with more. Some of the best illustrations are greyscale reproductions of paintings and lose much in the conversion, but fortunately through the magic of citations and the Internet, you can find the colour versions yourself.

If you're writing about or drawing synagogues in Europe before the 1980s, especially during the 19th century, I think this is a must-have. Even though that's not the case for me, I found it useful to fill some context often missing from more "general" resources that, intentionally or not, tend to focus on Christian architecture and history.

I was hesitant to buy Panoramas of Lost London because many of the photographs are repeats from Lost London, but I'm glad I did. The enlargements are transformative, making details visible that were difficult or impossible to see in the smaller prints in the earlier book. In reviewing Lost London, I marvelled at the signage being readable, but here, you can also read many of the posters and adverts.

The printing quality is excellent as ever, and the binding opens fairly flat, making it a perfect visual reference book. The book is very large and each spread contains only 1-2 images, so image size is not a problem the way it is in many other photo books - in fact, the size is a problem in that I can't fit this book in my workspace when it's open! The captions are interesting, though the information is largely the same as that in Lost London. Addresses are given, as are dates (to the day where possible). Like Lost London and perhaps even more so, most of the photos are from the 20th century with very few from the 19th, though the focus is very much on Victorian and earlier architecture.

The images are grouped into four chapters: Work, Wealth, Poverty, and Change. The first focuses on places of employ - shops, factories, markets, docks. It has numerous interiors of such places, exactly the sort of thing I felt was under-represented in Lost London. Wealth shows the homes and clubs of the rich, while Poverty is about the homes of and institutions for the poor, such as almshouses and charity schools. Change focuses mostly on construction, demolition, and WWII damage, though it also includes many images that don't deal with change any more than the other chapters do but which don't fit elsewhere.

If you're only looking to get one photo reference book of Victorian/Edwardian London, it should be either this one, or Lost London. If you're looking for breadth and vibes, Lost London will have more for you. If you're an artist looking for details, the enlarged photos in this one are probably the way to go - if you have the space for it.

Lost England is a large and heavy photo book of late 19th and early 20th century England, collecting hundreds of photographs of cities, towns, and the occasional village. Through brute size, it avoids being just a surface glance: it includes medieval and then-modern buildings, large cities and small towns, tourist-filled beaches and grimy factories.

The photos are grouped into chapters by region, which highlights the visual differences between different parts of the country, largely a consequence of local materials and geography. I was particularly struck by how different London looked compared to anywhere else in England. Fortunately, London doesn't dominate here like it does in many other books about England; it isn't even the most represented city in the book.

Even being over 500 pages doesn't give this book enough space to show many insignificant houses and streets like its London-oriented predecessors could; most of the images are of landmarks or otherwise significant buildings and locations, such as medieval survivals, town halls, bridges, and promenades. Still, the more "boring" streets, shops, and houses are present, and overall Lost England is a well-rounded collection.

Another potential issue is that most of the photos are from the 20th century and a significant number are from after WWI; 19th century photos are much less common. The England shown is largely what it would have been in the late 19th century, but the late dates of the photos do mean that details like adverts and clothing might not be what you're looking for. The upshot is that unlike earlier photographs, many of these include people going about their lives - laying roads, selling newspapers, unloading barges, milling munitions, watching children, enjoying the weather.

As with Lost London and Panoramas of Lost London, the printing quality is superb. The photos vary in size from two-page spreads to quite small, but most are decently large. The captions were occasionally in a different order to the photos, which made locating the described image a little awkward, but this was rarely a real problem since the captions are on the same spread as the photos, so there is never far to look.

If you're looking for visual reference of Victorian and Edwardian England and not just London, this is a fantastic book to have, provided you have the space for it.

"The Dirt on Clean" is a fun gallop through history through the lens of cleanliness, showing the evolution of the concept of hygiene and the means used to achieve it in western culture, from the Ancient Greeks to Europe and North America in the 2000s. Katherine Ashenburg discusses the religious, scientific, and social factors that influenced the standards of different eras, and the way these standards affected health, fashion, and even language.

The writing is easy to read. Though the author mostly maintains a neutral approach to the subject, the occasional anecdote or quip spices things up. As a popular history book covering over 2000 years, it does not dwell long on any particular era or development, but I felt it was enough. It's also pretty well cited, so it's possible to use it as a springboard for more research.

This book is a useful read if you're writing a historical story or working with a fantasy setting. Cleaning customs are an important expression of a culture's priorities and beliefs, and the Dirt on Clean will probably give you many things to think about for your stories. At least, it will probably put some things you already knew in context.

The one big issue I had with the Dirt on Clean is that its focus is firmly on cleaning dirt and sweat, there is very little about menstruation and defecation/urination, which I feel are a big part of cleanliness. I feel like I've read only half of the book this one claims to be - perhaps it would've been better with a less broad title.

Like its sequel, Crucial Interventions, the Sick Rose is a beautifully made book showcasing wonderful 19th century illustrations of a macabre topic - diseases, in this case. The printing is crisp, and the book's layout puts the artwork first and foremost. It's a joy to look through, even though the subject matter is far from joyous.

The introduction is a concise history of western medicine, anatomy, and medical illustration. The following chapters, each about a type of disease, describe the early modern history of the illness and its treatment. Having read Crucial Interventions first and expecting a similar disconnect between the text and artwork, I was pleasantly surprised to see the text more closely related to the visuals, and even more so at the fact that the captions for a few of the illustrations went into some detail about the specific case shown.

The book is let down somewhat by spotty citation, and the fact that the index of illustrations is ordered alphabetically by the authors' names rather than by the page number in the book, making it time-consuming to find the credits for a specific illustration.

For artists and writers working with a 19th century setting, I think this should be a good source of inspiration. Illness was everywhere in this era, and while fiction of and about the period often references tuberculosis, gout, and cholera, there was so much more that we might not think of, or dismiss as not visually noticeable. The Sick Rose will expand your visual vocabulary.

As an art book and a source of visual inspiration, Crucial Interventions is beautiful. The majority of its 256 pages are medical artwork from the 19th century, grouped according to general regions of the body, with the captions often pages away so that the art may be shown at its best. The 40 pages of short essays provide broad context for the environment that produced the illustrations and the procedures they illustrate, and remind us of the suffering that lay just out of frame, and of the costs of progress.

As a reference book for artists and writers, it is middling. The value of the illustrations is undeniable, but the captions provide only scraps of specific context. The text, setting the scene as it does, has no opportunity to expand on anything depicted in the images. In addition, only a few statements in the text are cited and the factual information is without citations, so following up is challenging. Fortunately, unlike the text, all the illustrations are well-credited in the back.

Many of the images in Crucial Interventions are available in the Wellcome Collection's online catalogue, but here, in high-quality print, they're more engrossing and appealing than they are on a screen. The uncoated paper makes them feel all the more visceral, with no glare to get in the way and flatten them. The book's layout is itself nearly as beautiful as the artwork inside, though I was not a fan of the neon orange ink used instead of black for some of the figures, as it made the already small images even harder to parse. The cover price of £20 is very good for the book's quality, and its beautiful illustrations are well worth a look if you can stomach the subject.

English Hospitals 1660-1948 summarises the evolution of the plans and architecture of hospitals in England. Though it technically covers the entire period in its title, most hospital types did not emerge until much later, so most of the book is about 19th and early 20th century buildings. It is illustrated with many photos, plans, and period drawings, all in black and white.

It's difficult to recommend this book as a reference for artists and writers because it's difficult to obtain and likely doesn't provide enough of the sort of information a writer or artist wants. Its broad coverage of design trends in style and plan means there's very little on the interiors, equipment, and working environment of these hospitals and the individual hospitals are given only a cursory look, while its focus on a single country makes it too narrow in scope to meaningfully contextualise hospital evolution for worldbuilding purposes.

Though the subject is dry, there are some delightful turns of phrase in the text that make it unexpectedly enjoyable to read. The images are high-quality, and many plans are provided that are difficult to find elsewhere, but in most cases, only one floor is shown. Still, with the informative text, they're enough to get a solid feel for how different types of hospitals tended to be designed, and how this changed over time.

If you're just looking for some ideas for a real or fictional 19th century hospital rather than looking to learn about the history of English hospital design, I recommend checking out the freely available scans from Hospitals and Asylums of the World (1893), which categorises hospitals by location, purpose, and layout, and provides a wealth of labelled plans.

Antique Medical Instruments is heavily illustrated with photos of medical instruments and related items from various collections, some in colour. Though it deals with instruments of the medieval era to the 1870s and mentions related tools from antiquity, most of the pictured objects are from the 1700s and 1800s, and the focus is on British instruments and developments. Though it's meant for collectors and its 1870 cut-off is chosen because the development of antisepsis around that time led to tools being made in simpler materials and plainer designs that are less interesting to collect, it's still a good book for writers and artists as reference for the tools of medical practice in that time and place.

The book is dominated by images, but the text is informative and provides context for the various tools both in terms of scientific developments and political ones, and makes note of those items which are typical for their time and those which are not, though it doesn't go into much detail on the specific objects in the images. I'll definitely be coming back to this one, and the image credits should be useful in locating better photos of the instruments. The usage of many of the standard tools is not described and the included glossary is very brief, so you may want to have Wikipedia at hand if you're not already familiar with medical tools and operations.

One of the appendices is a list of British (and, much more briefly, European and North American) instrument makers from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries, showing the trade cards of some of the 18th century ones, it's a great resource if you like including details like that.

If this book were easier to get, I'd recommend it more strongly. I managed to find it for $11 and that was a great purchase! Unfortunately, most listings for used copies of it are more in the range of $50-$180, and at those prices, I feel it might be better to spend some time browsing the online offerings of institutions like the Wellcome Collection and the Hunterian Museum.

"Unseen London" shows the interiors of fifty-ish locations in London that are seldom seen by the public. Though hefty, this is obviously not a book aiming to provide in-depth information. Instead, it serves as a great source of inspiration that may help you fill out urban settings with interesting places you might not normally think of.

Peter Dazeley's photographs are fantastic and well-presented. This is probably the nicest coffee table book I've seen. Many of the images are printed in spreads, but the book opens flat, so very little is lost to the binding. The photos don't thoroughly document the locations or provide a solid sense of space, but they evoke a strong feeling of place. Every group of images feels unique, not just through the architecture, but also through the traces left by history. The focus is squarely on interiors, but I'd have liked some photos, at least small ones, of the exteriors for context.

Mark Daly's text is brief, but includes a surprising amount of historical information; it can serve as a springboard for further research. My one complaint is that it sometimes describes rooms that aren't illustrated, which is a bit of a bummer.

Though this is a 2017 edition of a 2014 book, it's no mere reprint - a number of photos are from after 2014 and the text mentions the circa 2017 fate of many of the buildings - some hopeful, some sad.

Pairing two essays - one a biography of Benjamin Brecknell Turner, the other a discussion of the recurring themes and subjects in his work - with a selection of his work printed in high quality, "Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England Through a Victorian Lens" is a lovely look at one amateur photographer's work and its context - encroaching industrialisation, other early photographers, and the established conventions in landscape art.

Turner's images exude the Victorian nostalgia for the fictive pre-industrial Merry England, both by shunning modern elements and by occasionally juxtaposing them against ruined Medieval churches and otherwise timeless rural scenes. That much is clear from the images themselves, but the essays compare his art to that of other artists of the period, English and continental, to highlight the elements of "Englishness" in Turner's work.

The essays provide a lot of interesting context, and looking at the images as the essays refer to them is probably the best way to enjoy this book. Unfortunately, the captions for the plates provide only the photographs' titles, so re-reading/skimming the essays is necessary if you need the context again. More information in the captions would've been nice, even if it's redundant with the essays.

I enjoyed learning about BB Turner, even though I'd not heard of him before I came across this book. If, however, you're drawn in only by the book's subtitle and its promise of images of rural England, and have no interest in Victorian photography as a nascent art form, you may find yourself disappointed. Turner was not a photojournalist or surveyor, and he was not out to thoroughly document the places he photographed. His works are artistic impressions, as curated and staged as paintings; they focus on the ideal rather than the real. If you're not sure whether Benjamin Brecknell Turner's work will be of interest to you, look him up in the V&A's online collection, as most of the images can be found there.

"'Orrible Murder" is a selection of Illustrated Police News articles from 1867-1880. The writing ranges from respectful to tasteless, and the stories cover the gamut of people being terrible or having terrible things happen to them. Child murder and neglect, creative methods of suicide, animal abuse, machine accidents, and the occasional sea creature can all be found here.

Most of the stories are illustrated, and the printing quality is very good. The illustrations are quite fun despite the subject matter, as the artists relied largely on their imaginations. I do not know whether the articles are abridged, but they're certainly reformatted, so while this is a fun reference for Victorian tabloid articles, it should not be taken as representative of the look of such papers.

This is not a "serious" reference book, but if the subject is relevant to you, I think it's worth checking out. With the Illustrated Police News apparently not available online, this is probably the easiest way to get a taste of it.

If you're looking for more like this, the majority of the Illustrated London News is available online, as is some of the US Illustrated Police News. There are also the two volumes of de Vries's "History as Hot News".

"Victorian Taste" is the final book in a trilogy on Georgian and Victorian design, preceded by "Georgian Grace" and "Victorian Comfort", though it can be read on its own.

The first half of "Victorian Taste" discusses the prominent Gothicists who influenced Victorian architecture and design, such as Loudon, Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris. Though it does a good job of summarising their ideas and is illustrated with many examples, this part felt muddy and meandering. It feels like a very long set-up, providing context for what was to come.

In the second half, Gloag is in his element, discussing the practical rather than the theoretical. It covers the development of a new but unrecognised style of architecture in iron and glass, and the Victorian propensity for overwrought ornament in clashing styles - Gothic and classic, naturalistic and conventional. The jabs at Victorian design from the earlier books finally have their proof here, with some atrocious examples.

While "Victorian Comfort" focused on philosophy and domestic settings, "Victorian Taste" is about the resulting characteristics of Victorian design, and covers more public settings. It's not as enjoyable a read, but like its predecessors, it does a good job of summarising and characterising the highs and lows of design in this period.

The construction of the Panama Canal between 1889 and 1914 was thoroughly documented in photographs, and this book presents a selection of these photographs, as well as a few of the failed earlier attempts in the 1880s. A brief history of the project at the start of the book provides context. The captions include dates, sometimes to the day.

The photographs cover both the construction of the canal itself with the attendant challenges and machinery, and the lives of the construction workers, administrators, and the workers on site to serve them, such as cooks.

I found this at a thrift shop and got it even though I have no interest in this subject, but I found it a neat read. I can't gauge its usefulness to someone specifically drawing or writing about the Panama Canal as I haven't tried to look for more information and images, but if you're looking for visual inspiration for a fictional megaproject in this era, I think you'll find it here.

This is a collection of magazine illustrations of New York City (chiefly Manhattan, as the other boroughs were not quite part of the City yet) from the second half of the 19th century. The reproduction quality is very good - surprisingly so, even. There appears to be minimal reduction, and many of the images are full-page. The artwork itself is also wonderful and varied, some of the artists represented were masters of line and light. The subjects are many - there are newly constructed buildings and bridges, traditions and celebrations, fires, political conflicts, heat waves, markets, and many other events and aspects of life illustrated.

The captions are well-written and add quite a bit of context to the images. Sources down to the specific issue date are provided for the images, along with the full names of the artists where possible.

The contents are not in chronological order, so if you're interested in a particular decade, you'll have to look through everything. This is complicated by the fact that the image descriptions often run with no line breaks between different descriptions, requiring more effort to find the headings and dates.

If you're looking to get a feel for life in mid to late 19th century New York City, this should help. It may also be of use if you're working with a fictional Victorian-esque setting, as New York was not entirely dissimilar to the large British cities of this time, and with its elevated trains has a decidedly steampunk look.