"The Empress having now ordered and settled her Government to the best advantage and quiet of her Blazing-World, lived & reigned most happily and blessedly, & received oftentimes Visits from the Immaterial Spirits, who gave her Intelligence of all such things as she desired to know."
The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 5:41PM 
If Julian Assange edited The Reader's Digest, it might look like a bit like The Public Domain Review (except with fewer crying interns and less extradition.)
The Review pretty much describes itself - books, films and audio already in the public domain, made accessible with contextualizing essays and introductions from writers such as Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina and Lucy Worsley. Today, they put up the full text of Charles Dickens' The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi with an introduction by me. Therein, you may discover the difference between hardship and tinsel.
Multiple Outbreaks Reported - Finger Points to Defoe
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 7:17AM From the Lapham's Blog
You can barely flee down a city block these days without running smack into the middle of the newest zombie apocalypse, a genre usually traced back to Richard Matheson’s 1954 survivor novel, I Am Legend, but which finds a much more venerable precursor in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.
Electric Shadow
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 7:16AM Delighted to have signed on with Electric Shadow to work up a Grimaldi project - an Eidophusikon for the modern age.
The Napoleon Register
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 7:39AM Lord Byron (1788-1824): "The Grand Napoleon of the realms of Rhyme"
Professor James Moriaty (d.1893): "The Napoleon of Crime"
Adam Wayne (1904): "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"
Frederick Huth (1777-1864): "The Napoleon of the City"
Bernard Quaritch (1819-1899): "The Napoleon of Booksellers"
Sir Edmund Davis (1861-1939): "The Napoleon of Finance"
Henry Vardon (1870-1937): "The Napoleon of Golf"
Key Dates in the History of Clown Crime
Friday, August 26, 2011 at 12:16PM May 1836: Jean-Gaspard Debureau, creator of the iconic Pierrot and star of the Théâtre des Funambules is acquitted of murder in a packed Paris courtroom, despite having split the skull of a nineteen year-old man named Vielin, who had insulted his wife and spat in her face as they walked in the park.
July 1898: Bob Hunting, owner and clown of Hunting Brothers’ Circus shoots his bandleader for trying to organize a musicians’ strike to protest against unpaid wages.
July 1926: Detective Story Magazine publishes the first installment of Johnston McCulley’s “The Crimson Clown” series. The stories feature the adventures of Dalton Prouse, a bachelor and war veteran who wears a tight-fitting silk clown costume beneath his clothes in order to slip into the criminal underworld.
March 1953: First recorded instance of an armed robbery committed by a man in a clown mask. An unknown assailant robs the Sheridan Standard Service Station, Chicago, binding the attendant and making away with $148.
Just a few of the many true-life clown-related atrocities I compiled for Issue 42 of Cabinet. Out now, bookshops.
Diets of the Romantic Poets
Friday, June 24, 2011 at 4:03PM From the Lapham's blog...
The most notable meal in the history of English Romantic poetry took place on a Sunday afternoon in late December, 1817 as a garrulous group of men assembled at the London home of the artist, Benjamin Robert Haydon.
The guests included William Wordsworth, the essayist Charles Lamb, one of Haydon’s models, a gatecrasher, and a young unknown named John Keats. According to Haydon’s diary, it was a great success—a big boozy incitement full of laughter, argument, and discussion of topics as diverse as Homer, mathematics, and postage stamps—all in the shadow of the host’s enormous, jostling masterpiece, Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem, which hung on the dining-room wall.
My Grandfather's Byron
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 4:48PM My grandfather, Elijah Goddard, died a quarter of a century before I was born. I know virtually nothing about him, so it was a surprise when yesterday my mother gave me one of his old books, a copy of Byron’s Complete Works, published in 1896.
Tucked inside it was a cutting from the Nottingham Weekly Guardian for 1st July 1939, describing the moment Canon T. G. Barber of Hucknall Church unsealed the Byron family vault to examine the poet’s remains.
Those Awful In-Laws
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 8:32AM The Middletons may be ghastly parvenus, but when it comes to in-laws, the royal family has a long tradition of welcoming all sorts to the fold, from the enthusiastically genocidal to the ostentatiously mad.
Dipsomaniacs are particularly well-represented, and among the best of them was Christian IV, King of Denmark, and brother-in-law to James I. When Christian paid a visit it was tempting to hide behind the sofa, as it wasn’t just boring middle-class talk about mortgages one had to endure, but whole weeks of life-threatening benders.
Revealed: The Deadly Fighting Art of Sherlock Holmes and Yitzhak Rabin!!! (sort of).
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 11:05AM Here’s the problem – what to do when you love a good punch up, but public brawling is incompatible with your image as an amenable, if damp-stained, man of letters? The answer is “Bartitsu,” a nineteenth-century martial art developed specifically to transform the upright classes into killing machines, and whose unusual history has been revealed in an excellent new documentary produced and presented by my friend, Tony Wolf.
