Oil Drum Lane

  In Essen in the 1830s, Karl Baedeker saw a golden opportunity for his modest family printing business. As transport around Europe improved and people travelled more, they would value pocketbooks crammed with information on the practicalities and sights. Starting in his native Germany it wasn't long before his name became synonymous with these tourist guides which have survived competition and are still produced by his descendants today. Karl Baedeker  He wasn’t the first to do this, there were vacuum cleaners before there were hoovers. They are less like the guidebooks we use today and more like directories or almanacs.  I have three original London Baedekers, the 2 nd edition from 1879 when his son ran the company and Imperial Britain was in its pomp, the 14 th from 1911 in the Edwardian era when it was in relative decline and on the descent into WW1, and the 18 th from 1923 when it was in post-trauma recovery. From time to time I have flicked through them, usually ...

This covers my two Baedeker editions from just before and just after World War One.   1911 : The Twilight of Edwardian Britain : 14th Edition The received image of this period is one of elites partying while storm clouds gathered over Europe. Queen Victoria had been called staid and stuffy but no one could accuse her son and successor Edward of that. But he too had now passed on to a higher-living plane so Britain was between monarchs.  Over the thirty years since the 2nd Edition, the London that tourists would experience had changed radically. Electric lighting, motorised taxis, wireless and the first species of plastic made their first appearance while Einstein had pointed out that even Baedeker’s timelines were relative.  H G Well's Martians had been and gone from Woking, Sherlock Holmes had  moved into his (non-existent) home at 221b Baker Street and G K Chesterton had anticipated an invasion of Notting Hill by the French.  In the febrile atmosphere of ...

  I've been around awhile. When I was a kid, thanks to giant telescopes, we knew that the moon was not made of green cheese but was grey, arid and cratered. When it came to objects further away we were ignorant. Cue vivid imagining of other worlds for vinyl album covers, TV and film sets and drawings in comics. Limited budgets for TV shows like Doctor Who and Lost in Space used studio 'landscapes' with flat floors, painted landscapes and polystyrene rocks. Realism was understandably not a priority for album covers and comics were concerned with filling every frame with action. Whap! Zoom!   Lost in Space. Mid 1960's  In 1969 Apollo 11 confirmed that the moon was indeed grey, arid and cratered and I had ditched those comics for sci-fi novels while film budgets had ballooned, but few had pretensions to realism simply because we had no idea what 'real' was when it came to other planets. So how did they depict them?  'Yes' Album Cover 1973 I will focus firs...