Short one this week as I was out-of-town (wasn’t doing book research, but inadvertently found some anyway!) Enjoy:
- Bestselling author Dan Brown helps fund Amsterdam esoteric book collection – Brown’s donation will go towards digitization of the Ritman Library‘s extensive collection of Western hermetic and alchemical texts.
- ‘Too cruel for a sport’: Florence’s renaissance football – dating from the 1530s, calcio storico players are so hardcore they’ve played despite plague, famine, and military attack.
- Bafflin’ Island: The Mystery of Frobisher’s Ore – English privateer Martin Frobisher commanded three mining voyages to what is now Canada in the 1570s. His personal assayers found such persuasive evidence of gold that his ships hauled tons of ore back to England only to discover it was worthless. Were Frobisher’s assayers incompetent or frauds?
- Fool’s Journey: The Fascinating Life of Pamela Colman Smith – the Rider-Waite tarot deck should really be the Rider-Waite-Smith deck as this all round artist, suffragette, synesthete, and occultist did all the art.
#/media/File:RWS_Tarot_00_Fool.jpg){kind=link}