Winnie-the-Pooh House for Sale

5/23/2012 Edit This 0 Comments »

Now would be the perfect time to have a spare £2,000,000 ($3.3m) cluttering up the corners—A. A. Milne's country house, Cotchford Farm, is on the market for the first time in over 40 years. Cotchford farm in Sussex is where Milne's little boy, Christopher Robin Milne, spent his summer days, and where Winnie-the-Pooh came to being. The Grade II Listed country house is surrounded by gardens and woodland near Ashdown Forest, which served as inspiration for 500 Acre Wood and, nearby, one can still visit the bridge which became Poohsticks Bridge. The area is now commonly called "Pooh Country." 





The house is offered for sale by Savills.



NB: All images in this post ©Savills.

Writing Britain: Exhibition at the British Library

5/22/2012 Posted In , , , Edit This 1 Comment »

 The British Library exhibition "Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands" opened last week and will run through September 25th, 2012. The exhibition explores how English literature and authors have been influenced by British landscapes. The multimedia exhibition has over 150 exhibits, including everything from Medieval manuscripts to 21st-century audio and video recordings. The texts range from manuscripts of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Wordsworth and Blake, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter.



William Langland's Piers Plowman

 
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground

 
Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

 
J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone


Other works on display include:
A 10th-c. manuscript of The Seafarer  
The Mabinogion
Drayton's Poly-Olbion
Katherine Phillips' A Country-Life
Stow's Survey of London
Jane Austen's Persuasion
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
Coleridge's 'Lakes notebook'
William Blake's Notebook
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest
Tolkien's The Hobbit
Graham Greene's The Wind in the Willows

 The BBC have a lovely video with curator Jamie Andrews describing the exhibition, here.




NB: All images in this post ©British Library. In the U.S., under U.S. copyright law, they are Public Domain and are used under a Creative Commons license.

Medieval Illuminated Initial Cookies

5/20/2012 Posted In , , Edit This 1 Comment »

I wanted to share with you some Medieval manuscript cookies I made for my friend and colleague, Risa Bear, creator of Renascence Editions. I chose historiated initials from several manuscripts, printed them on edible paper with edible ink, attached them to square cookies and gave them gold edges. Who says love of literature and art can't fill a belly?! 





Updated to add (5-25-12): I've gotten countless requests for these wafer papers; they are available for purchase here. Happy baking! :)

Updated to add (5-28-12): I've added a step-by-step "How-To" for these cookies here.

 Updated to add (5-29-12): Overwhelming response to these wafer papers—I've run out of edible ink! I'm slated to get a delivery of more ink on June 1st and, when I do, I'll activate the Etsy listing again. Thank you, everyone! :)

 Updated to add (6-1-12): Have ink & Etsy listing active again. Thanks for your patience!