The artwork on the Buccoo Reef stamp from the Trinidad & Tobago Independence issue of 1962 is occasionally credited to Carlisle Chang, but looks nothing like anything he ever painted, and, in fact, looks a lot like the mural behind the bar of a Port of Spain hotel.
With thanks to Post Dates: A Chronology of Intriguing Events in the Mails and Philately (1985) by Kenneth Wood.
From S. Clay Wilson
The fascinating red stain on this postcard aside, Acqui, a city in northern Italy, has been famous for its hot sulphur springs since the second century BC. Pliny counted the baths as the best in the Roman empire.
On this postcard, circa 1922, Alice Cogswell Pardo writes, “Dear Dr. Hastings, I have been at these Italian Baths now three weeks and I think they have done one good although I am not yet like the man in the Bible ‘walking and leaping and praising God.’ However I walk with more ease and less pain. I hope you are well and when I return that I shall have the pleasure of seeing you. Dr. Pardo joins me in greetings.”
Alice Cogswell Pardo, of Rochester, N.Y., died in 1924 at the age of 70.
“December 5–It keeps getting worse. So much snow, my toes are frostbitten. I am so hungry. This evening after a long march we entered Stalingrad. We were welcomed by exploding shells. We ended up in a cellar. Thirty of us. Absolutely filthy, unshaved. We can barely move. There’s very little to eat. Three or four cigarettes. A dreadful, savage group of men. I am so unhappy! All is lost. People are fighting constantly, everyone’s on their last nerve. The mail’s not getting through, it’s terrible.”
— From the diary of a German private with the 6th Army, surrounded in Stalingrad, 1942, in Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich (2015) by Jochen Hellbeck
Circe by Warwick Goble
Morgan le Fay by William Henry Margetson
Postcards by Hashimoto Gahō (1835-1908), from Art of the Japanese Postcard: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004).
This postcard, with its reference to a one-way trip and a ferned pool, left me wanting to know more. Elisha Mitchell (Yale, Class of 1813) was an American educator and geologist. His studies – in 1835, 1838 and 1844 – led him to claim that North Carolina’s “Black Dome” was the highest peak east of the Mississippi River. Years later, after a former student challenged his assertion, Mitchell returned to verify his earlier measurements. On June 27, 1857, leaving his son and guides, he started out alone, was caught in a thunderstorm, and apparently fell down a 60-foot waterfall, struck his head and drowned in the pool below.
In 1881–82, the U.S. Geological Survey upheld Mitchell’s measurements and officially named the peak Mt. Mitchell. The stone lookout tower shown on the postcard was built in 1926. A new tower was built in 2009.
Atop the Great Pyramid, circa 1925. Photo by George Rinhart.
Postcard by Sugiura Hisui from Art of the Japanese Postcard: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004)
Read, Seen, Heard 