#John George Wood

[uwmspeccoll]

A Feathursday of Wood-Engraved Parrots

This week we showcase some Psittaciformes engraved in wood by the Brothers Dalziel from the Birds volume of The Illustrated Natural History by English natural history writer John George Wood (1827-1889), published in London by George Routledge & Sons in 1865.

J. G. Wood was not a professional zoologist, but rather an ordained priest who relinquished his pastoral duties to become one of the most well-known parson-naturalists of the Victorian era, especially for his numerous publications and his famous public lectures both in Great Britain and America.

The Brothers Dalziel was a prominent family wood-engraving business founded in 1839 by George Dalziel (1815-1902), and composed of four brothers and one sister. The engravings shown here were made from illustrations by several artists, including William Stephen Coleman, Harrison Weir, and T. W. Wood.

View another post with illustrations engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.

View more Feathursday posts.

View moreposts with wood engravings!

[antiqueanimals]

Wallachian Sheep. (1898). John George Wood (English, 1827 – 1889)

[gmzriver]

Peter Pan (2003) headers. 

like if you use or save

[bonithica-art]

we were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that’s all

[by-georgie-wood]

ringo being 5'6 is so important to me the height difference between him and the other beatles is so very i mean just look at him he's a teeny tiny little guy

[glowing-gold]

Conversations with my Brother in Law

[araekniarchive]

i love your webs <3 maybe one about duality / good vs evil in a person? :0

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

Dexter (2006–2013), 2x12: The British Invasion

Neal Shusterman, Unwind

No One Is Alone, from Into The Woods, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Garbage, Wolves

Zero Effect (1998) dir. Jake Kasdan

George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

Murder On The Orient Express (2017) dir. Kenneth Branagh

Isaac Friedlander, Illustration to Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXILV, “Two loves I have for comfort and despair...” (detail)

Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

The Great (2020–), 2x10: Wedding

Will Hill, After the Fire

[all-action-all-picture]

BLAZING COMBAT

The four issues of Blazing Combat from Warren Magazines in 1965/1966. They featured stories by Archie Goodwin and art by Gene Colan, Reed Crandall, George Evans, Russ Heath, Al McWilliams, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Angelo Torres, Alex Toth, Al Williamson and Wallace Wood. All had covers by Frank Frazetta.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Θαρσείν χρη, τάχ’ αύριον έσσετ’ άμεινον. Eλπίδες εν ζωοίσιν, ανέλπιστοι δε θανόντες.*

- Theocritus

You need to have courage, because tomorrow will be better. While there's life there’s hope, and only the dead have none.*

My ex-regiment proudly traces its lineage back to the Glider Pilot Regiment which spearheaded British airborne forces to take Pegasus Bridge on D Day 6 June 1944. During my service I had the privilege to travel there and take part in the commemorative ceremonies whenever D Day came around. I loved listening to the stories of some of the surviving veterans and also some of the local French too. The British taking of Pegasus Bridge - re-named partly after the emblem of pegasus of airborne forces - was one of the stand out events of the first days of D Day by British forces.

Airborne landings in the British Sector were targeted mainly at the Orne River/Caen Canal crossings and the artillery installations of the Merville Battery. The strategic purpose was to secure river crossings for the beach break-out and to reduce enemy defences.

At 00:16 hours on 6th June parachutists and gliders from the Airborne Division, consisting of D Company of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, began to land east of the River Orne and the Caen Canal.

The small force of 181 men was commanded by Major John Howard and joined with a detachment of Royal Engineers who landed at Ranville-Benouville in six 28-men Horsa gliders. Having taken off from Dorset, the gliders were towed across the Channel by Halifax Bombers. With perfect navigation and piloting skill, the gliders landed on time and on target within few yards of each other.

Major Howard’s glider landed within a few feet of the canal bridge. The bridge was captured after a fierce ten minute fire fight, the action all over by 00:26, a full six hours before the beach landings.

But the success of the mission was also down to intelligence gathered by locals and passed onto British intelligence through the French resistance channels. 

One of these was Georges Gondrée and his wife, Thérèse. Georges and Thérèse moved to Bénouville where they bought a small café in 1934 on the shore along the Bénouville Bridge, called Café Gondrée. During the Invasion, they had three small daughters: Georgette, Arlette, and the newborn Françoise.

The family certainly hated the German occupation. Among other things, they refused to allow their café to serve as a billet for German soldiers. But they went further by joining the French resistance at great danger to themselves.

As the war progressed, the more risks and dangerous activities they undertook against the Germans. Thérèse, who grew up in Alsace, knew quite a bit of German. Local residents did not like her Germanic Alsatian accent  but she took care to keep her knowledge of German secret from the German soldiers themselves. This often helped her to eavesdrop on conversations of the soldiers and then pass on important information to the resistance through her husband, Georges. There were a few times when they were nearly caught but somehow they survived.

The information gathered by the Gondrée family contributed greatly to the insight of Major Howard and his troops to better assess the defensive positions around the bridge. Among other things, Thérèse was able to pinpoint the exact location of the detonator that was supposed to have detonated the bridge during the attack. Georges was also known to British intelligence and even Major Howard had heard his name mentioned during the planning of the invasion itself.

The importance of the family’s contribution to the success of the British attack can also be seen from an example during early May 1944. When Field Marshal Erwin Rommel came to inspect the bridge, he had given the order to place an anti-tank gun beside the Bénouville Bridge. Within two days Major Howard had been informed that a new structure was being built along the bridge and within a week Georges’ observation had helped to confirm both its function and exact location.

So, just 90 minutes after taking off from RAF Tarrant Rushton in England, Major Howard was able to send the code words “Ham and Jam”, indicating that both bridges had been captured. In this early action of D-Day, the first house on French soil was liberated, and the first British soldier of the Normandy Invasion was killed in action: Lieutenant Den Brotheridge.

It was No. 1 Platoon which knocked out a machine gun position firing from the bridge and rushed across to capture the far side, firing from the hip and lobbing grenades during the charge. Lt. Brotheridge was mortally wounded by gunfire as he made a grenade attack on a second machine gun position. The bridge had been prepared by the enemy for demolition, although the Royal Engineers removed the unset charges.

Within half an hour of the bridge being taken, 6th Airborne parachutists landed to provide reinforcement. The Ox & Bucks were reinforced half-an-hour after the landings by 600 men of 7th Battalion, the Parachute Regiment who were the relieving force to bear the brunt of German counter-attacks to the west of the Caen Canal throughout the 6th of June.

The Battalion distinguished itself in holding a wide bridgehead around ‘Pegasus Bridge’ against constant enemy attacks which were often armour supported. In particular the “A” Company, based in the nearby village of Bénouville, suffered the most severe fighting and were eventually cut off from the remainder of the 7th Battalion.

The first relief in force was from 6 Commando, led by the commander of the 1st Special Service Brigade, Lord Lovat, who arrived to the sound of the Scottish bagpipes, played by the 21–year-old so-called ‘Mad Piper’, Private Bill Millin.

The remnants of the 7th Battalion’s “A” Company continued to hold out until 9:15pm on the 6th June when British infantry, in the form of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Warwickshires, arrived from the invasion beaches and secured Bénouville, and so allowed the evacuation of “A” Company’s many wounded.

In honour of the distinctive emblem of the Parachute Regiment, the distinctive bridge at Benouville was renamed and will forever be known as “Pegasus Bridge”.

Arlette Gondrée being kissed by two veterans who remember her parents.

Over the years, many thousands of pairs of British boots have crossed the threshold of the Café Gondrée. General Montgomery in 1945, veterans paying tribute to fallen comrades and numerous members of the Royal family.  Arlette Gondrée, the daughter of Georges and Thérèse, still recalls with crystal clarity the very first occasion a British soldier arrived at the cafe on the night of June 5, 1944, when she was just four-years-old, cowering with her family in the basement during the start of the D-Day invasion.

Commemorating the landings in 1945, General Montgomery visited the Café Gondrée Pegasus Bridge, renamed after the winged emblem of the British 6th Airborne Division, with some widows of the soldiers lost in the Normandy campaign. Georges produced some of the vintage champagne he had hidden, including a 1926 Pouilly-Fuissé.

Over the ensuing years, the family never ceased to celebrate their liberation. “Daddy would make a large U-shaped table in the café and we would eat together as a happy family, and very, very thankful to the British for what they did for us. And that remains so to this day.”

Life was hard for years, made worse by rationing. The effect of the ordeal on the girls was subtle, but not invisible: in November 1944, the Red Cross visited and told Arlette if she stopped biting her nails, they would give her a real doll to replace her cardboard toy. The café didn’t open properly again until June 1945.

To this day, Mme Gondrée keeps her “little house” as a shrine to the British Airborne forces that liberated her family. She has said that she always felt honoured to have the privilege of being custodian of the memories of that fateful day.

Photo: Major John Howard is flanked by George Gondrée and Lt. David Woods raising a glass to the successful capture of Pegasus Bridge that day.

[balu8]

Wonder Woman #3

by George Perez; Bruce T. Patterson; Tatjana Wood and John Costanza

DC

[uwmspeccoll]

Science Saturday

IT’S THE BEETLES!

Sarah Finn, our long-time graduate intern and former social media science editor (now Archival Projects Librarian at Milwaukee Public Library) was always deeply intrigued by insects, especially beetles. So, in her honor we present these wood-engraved and chromolithographed beetles from our 1885 three-volume edition of J. G Wood’s Animate Creation, adapted to American zoology by the American physician and zoologist Joseph B. Holder and published in New York by Selmar Hess. The publication, a revision of Wood’s original 1853 British publication The Illustrated Natural History, was originally issued in 60 fascicles, with the chromolithographs printed by the noted Boston lithographing firm L. Prang & Company. Many of the images used in these volumes also appeared in other natural history publications in America and Europe, such as Brehms Thierleben. 

View another post from Animate Creation.

[antiqueanimals]

Silk-Worm, and Moths. (1898). John George Wood (English, 1827 – 1889)

[harrisonarchive]

“[W]e were at the point where we’d recorded the ‘Norwegian Wood’ backing track (twelve-string and six-string acoustic, bass and drums) and it needed something. We would usually start looking through the cupboard to see if we could come up with something, a new sound, and I picked the sitar up — it was just lying around, I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous, I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted and it worked.” - George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology (2000)

“You don’t have to know all about it [Indian music], you just have to be open to it — to the rhythms and the sounds of it. You don’t have to know exactly how they do it. Which in some sense, I guess, is what led to the bastardization of Indian music, which, I suppose, I started back with [adding sitar to Lennon/McCartney’s] ‘Norwegian Wood.’ But, you know, all I was doing really was trying to get the sound. You can’t resist the sound of the instruments, you can’t resist the sound of Indian classical music if you’re ready to surrender to it and not judge it. Just accept it and listen to it. Which is why I got into it. It was just overpowering, in a transcendental way.” - George Harrison, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1997 (x)

[seanastinhopeunquenchable]

Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Elijah Wood and Dominic Monahan as The Beatles!!!

Dom is apparently somewhat obsessed with re-creating Beatles images! The first two hobbit photos were recently posted on his Instagram.

EDIT: Another pair of photos added!

[youlooklikeabeeandilikebees]

what do you think is the most ICONIC moment from all of being human? not your favorite moment but one that you think embodies the show as a whole, captures its essence, or otherwise stands out to you?

[rolloroberson]

In memory of Billy Preston on the anniversary of his passing June 6, 2006. Billy was one of the greatest keyboardists of his generation.