Blue Electrode Lite

Today, we’re taking a virtual vacation in Germany! We’ll be wandering through Berlin and Munich, with a side stop at the salt springs of Bad Nauheim.

“It would be difficult to conceive a more imposing spectacle of the kind, than is brought in a moment before the gaze of the stranger, who for the first time enters the Prussian capital, from the side of Charlottenburg. Situated in a dead level, and overshadowed by plantations and groves, Berlin is completely hidden from you till you have passed the barrier; when you are introduced all at once to a scene, of the gorgeous magnificence of which, no one, till he shall have thus made acquaintance with it, may hope to form a conception. Your carriage having passed beneath the span of the gateway, which not being arched, produces a two-fold striking effect, halts at the barrier guard-house, and so enables you to look forth upon the entire extent of the Unter den Linden….”
[Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, visited in 1837 (1839), p. 61]

“My first impression of Munich was of a place simply irradiated with the love of beauty. … [The] squares, with their old tower-gates and churches and massed houses, were grouped as if composed by the eye of a painter. And although one half of the Marien-Platz is the work of our day, yet few squares in Europe have given me a deeper sense of the combined opulence and simplicity, the dignity and pure beauty, that used to invest the forums of medieval towns like Siena and Nuremberg.”
[Romantic Germany (1910), p. 301]

Images:

Berlin: 1. Ansicht Berlin’s, no date. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; 2. Berlin. Unter den Linden, circa 1890-1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Guidebook: 3. Baedeker’s handbook for Northern Germany (1886), page xiii (first page of Introduction). University of California Libraries via Internet Archive.
Bad Nauheim: 4. Postcard of Sprudelhof, circa 1923. Joseph McGarrity Collection, Villanova University Digital Library.
Munich: 5. The Bavaria, with Temple of Fame, circa 1890-1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; 6. Munich. Hofbrauhaus, circa 1890-1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Ahoy, mateys, have a look at this here pirate booty from our Digital Library! These pictures be drawn by a landlubber by the name of Jack Yeats.

1. “A View of Pirate Island” from Jack B. Yeats: His Pictorial and Dramatic Art (1911) by Ernest Marriott.

2. “A Youthful Pirate” from A Broadside (August 1908).

3. “The Pirate Sentry” from A Broadside (December 1911).

4. “Theodore the Pirate” from A Broadside (May 1910).

“Any traveller in the North of Ireland who does not see the Giant’s Causeway is certain to be regarded as not quite right in his mind. As our friends were all in the possession of their sober senses, they arranged to visit this wonder of the world…”
[The Boy Travellers in Great Britain and Ireland (1891), p. 80]

“One of the old names of the Causeway was Binguthan[?], the Giant’s Cape. Fin mac Cumhal, the hero of Irish fable, was supposed to have been the architect of this stupendous edifice, as the Basaltar[?] regions of Iceland are attributed by the natives to their Giants—“the sons of Frost” of the Edda.”
[handwritten note on inside front cover of A Guide to the Giants Causeway (1823)]

Images: The Northern Tourist, or, Stranger’s Guide to the North and North-west of Ireland (1830); The Scientific Tourist Through Ireland (1818); The Boy Travellers in Great Britain and Ireland (1891); Giant’s Causeway, photocrom print (circa 1890) from the Library of Congress collections.