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Patrick Leary

@patrickleary.bsky.social
2.4K followers 1.7K following 923 posts

Historian, esp. 19c press, talk, book history. Author “Googling the Victorians,” “Punch Brotherhood,” etc. Co-founder SHARP, mgr VICTORIA. Fond of Old Time Radio, 60s Top 40, tennis, London. Liberal Texan in self-imposed Midwest exile. FRHistS

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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Interesting, I'd like to see that. Ten years earlier, in his memoir, he mentions meeting John Lane and reels off the names of the Yellow Book's contributors, but contends, oddly, that all periods of English literature, including the '90s', are somehow the same.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I'm so sorry for your loss, Rebecca. This is our beloved Bean (at right) with her best buddy, Abi. They met up for playdates every week. Both are gone now, but they made us, and each other, very happy for a long time.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Our Iga's constant companion is called Snuggle...
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Well, as you’re kind enough to ask…here she is with her best pal, Snuggle.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Peter Coviello in The Defector, courtesy of Rusty Foster: defector.com/dolly-joseph...
So it isn’t the vulnerability of “Jolene,” the grandeur of “I Will Always Love You,” or the absolute-banger pure pop perfection of “9 to 5” that catches me up about Dolly. Go watch the videos, the performances, the interviews. Like almost nobody else, Dolly Parton made goodness—actual humane large-hearted unbelittling funny filthy gregarious workaday decency—seem like the most natural thing in the world, an ordinary habitude, as easy as stepping off the bus. It shines off her like a cloak of light.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
cuddles + sunshine = bliss
Iga the golden retriever basks in the sun while enjoying a chest rub.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Palm Springs, first visit there and everywhere I turned the sky was doing something awe-inspiring.
Clouds over Palm Springs, March 2026
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
OK, my pick would be the chapter on "Authorship" that Andrew Nash and I wrote for Vol. 6 of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Ran into Andrew in London earlier this year and we agreed to feel pretty good about that one.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Sonny Corleone learns that Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
In praise of mugs
A pair of Victor coffee mugs.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Good to see you, too!
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Who can forget this scene from The Hound of the Baskervilles? I can, and did. With thanks to the amazing @arkhamlibrarian.bsky.social for another pulp take on a Victorian classic!
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
They’ve still got quite a ways to go, as you know, but it’s a start!
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
So happy to be in Dublin for this year’s @rs4vp.org meeting. Here posing with Sir Isaac amid the empty shelving of the soon to be renovated Old Library…and searching in vain for someone to explain to me why the letter J is missing from all the shelves. #RSVP2026
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I’m more or less particular about my particulates, and these have been particularly unwelcome.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Firesign led the way in '69...
Partial cover of the 1969 Firesign Theatre comedy album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All, featuring photos of Groucho Marx and John Lennon and the words "All Hail Marx Lennon"
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
A better shot of the cover…
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
A curious bookshop find: a 1915 edition of Alice in Wonderland with a promotional tie-in to the silent movie starring Viola Savoy. It’s illustrated with stills from the film.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Jane Eyre reimagined in Classics Illustrated #39 (1947), cover by Harley Griffiths. There's just something about these 1940s-50s pulp and comic-book remediations of 19th-c. texts...
Classics Illustrated Jane Eyre shows madwoman Bertha Mason Rochester, violently restrained as she attempts to disrupt a marriage ceremony.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
#NoKings Wilmette, Illinois.
Organizer Carter Cleland addresses the crowd at Wilmette’s No Kings rally.Sherrill Weaver and Patrick Leary at Wilmette’s No Kings rally 28 March 2026.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
Here is @bushraamiwala.bsky.social firing up the crowd at Wilmette’s No Kings rally. #nokings #nokingswilmette
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
The humbug list is so interesting! The Claimant had been released from prison that same year, so perhaps the press's rehashing of the case helped to boost his numbers in the poll. Wilde had appeared in the center of Frith's RA painting in 1883: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
Indeed.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
News of the imminent demise of the mass market paperback has sent my thoughts back to some of the more luridly packaged “classics” of my youth.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
You know you’re back in Texas when…
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
That’s so interesting. It reminds me of the way William Heinemann, in the following century, would sometimes include an extra spine label tipped in at the back for when the original one wore off. Here’s a copy of Max Berbohm’s AND EVEN NOW with what booksellers call the “spare label.”
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
That's so interesting. Of course he had been in the public eye for well over 20 years at that point, and the frequent subject of the kind of celebrity interviews ("authors at home" etc.) that had become all the rage. Still, the difference from all the other prominent journalists is surprising.
Punch caricature of George Augustus Sala, 27 August 1881 p. 84
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
Thanks for this. I’m reminded that even in older movies glasses could be important signifiers. Mary (Donna Reed) doesn’t need glasses in Bedford Falls, but in the dystopian world of Pottersville she’s consigned to a bespectacled life as the old maid librarian.
Donna Reed in “It’s a Wonderful Life”
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Nothing wrong with this look…
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
The wonderful scholar Brian Maidment, who died last year, wrote a very shrewd analysis of this caricature in his _Comedy, Caricature, and the Social Order, 1820-1850_, as well as in his definitive biography of Robert Seymour, the artist. Brian also chose it for the cover--it's irresistible.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
When I heard Lydia give a talk about this at the 25th anniversary NAVSA conference in Bloomington a couple of years ago, I'd just been reading Morley's life of Richard Cobden, and this passage struck me as a good example of personal grief translated into political activism.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Although Shirley Brooks of the Punch staff was a Tory he admired Mill's stance on female suffrage, and at Brooks's suggestion John Tenniel drew this mildly satiricial cartoon that appeared in the number for 30 March 1867. babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc...
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
British newspapers of the period didn't carry front-page headlines in the modern sense, but individual articles did often have upper-case headings, and a quick search of the British Newspaper Archive turns up a lot of headings like this one from the Edinburgh Evening News of 2 June 1884
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
I saw this sign today at a mall in Skokie, Illinois, listing prohibited behaviors. All seemed more or less OK til I got to #9: “Free speech activity not authorized in advance.” Shove it, Westfield Old Orchard. We won’t be asking your permission for “free speech activity.”
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Bradley Whitford and Allison Janney in a scene from The West Wing
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
A fave from today, with grandchild in tow.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
Favorite sign at Wilmette, Illinois No Kings rally today: “If Kamala had won we’d all be at brunch right now.”
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
Wilmette, Illinois on No Kings day — a righteously angry but joyful crowd of America-lovers.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
So sorry to hear that Jane Goodall has died. She was just here in Chicago for the “Becoming Jane” exhibit at the Field. I treasure the memory of meeting her in 1971, after a lecture she gave; she was kindly, I was in awe. Lately I learned that she’s the heroine of several kids’ books, & rightly so.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
Lord Houghton's reminiscence (ca. 1879) about the Courvoisier execution in 1840. Interesting, but not surprising, that Thackeray omitted this rhyming song from his magnificent essay in Fraser's Mag. about what he called "the sickening, ghastly wicked scene": "Going to See a Man Hanged." #victorian
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
How about the second stanza of Clive James's imperishable "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered," with its happy phrase "the Edsels of the world of moveable type"? The whole poem would be great fun, of course, but a stanza would fit nicely on one smallish card.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
A pleasant Victorianist pastime: zooming in on the faces in Frith's "A Private View of the Royal Academy 1881" to see how many look familiar, then looking up the rest on the key to the painting: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co... upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
W.P. Frith's 1883 painting, "A Private View of the Royal Academy 1881".  The portion at right, with Oscar Wilde surrounded by admirers, is frequently reproduced.A key to the Frith painting, showing the identities of most but all of the people depicted.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Finally, the bringing together of the greatest history *brains* with a boatload of *cash*. Result: The Historians’ History of the World. This news just came my way (via a local bookshop) from Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine, November 1905. I sure hope it’s not too late to place my order.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Admiring the pollinator garden outside the local library yesterday I spotted this little guy among the yellow blossoms. Made my day.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
Jason Camlot’s fascinating plenary lecture at #rsvp2025 on the figure of voice in C19 periodicals of speech and elocution #victorian #19th-c
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
Terrific panel on C19 periodical advertising at #rsvp2025. Here’s one of @vjctorianist.bsky.social ‘s slides, showing adverts vs sales in the Northern Star. #19th-c #victorian
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
A friend of mine is puzzling over this 1855 New York State census listing and I'm at a loss. The listed occupation appears to be "Phintion," which makes no sense to either of us, but we can't think of an alternative reading. Any ideas?
Census listing
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
One of the fundraising emails in my inbox today nicely illustrates, on its subject line, how typos can matter. Do better, Democratic Party of Illinois.
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Patrick Leary @patrickleary.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
With dear friend Rushmore DeNooyer at our 50th Brown University reunion this weekend. Such a moving experience.
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