Mini-Catalogue 192: Poetry, Manuscripts, Archives.

I've spent a good part of the last several weeks getting some new bridge-work done on my "two front teeth," as the old song has it. I lost one of them in a basketball encounter with the back of a friend's head in the early nineties, and just like all across the country, I guess the infrastructure in my mouth was finally beginning to crumble. Luckily, I was in a position where I could get it replaced.

English calligraphic broadside poem, ca. 1782

But I've also been able to put together a little list of 15 items, loosely grouped under the triple rubric of "Poetry, Manuscripts, Archives."  As usual, when I cobble together such groupings, some items fit more than one of the categories.

Included, of course, is the calligraphic poem pictured above, an English item I cannot help but compare to the colorful manuscripts that were being produced at the same time by Americans working in the "fraktur" tradition, inherited and transformed from German-language regions of Europe. 

Anyway, here's hoping you'll find something in the list to sink your own teeth into.