Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Endpapers and Zeppelins

I've been spending the beginning of this week continuing to treat the Kaiser Wilhelm's photo albums.  (Or as Grandma Elva would say, "His albins.")  The subjects are usually one of the three categories:
1). War Games
2). State Visits
3). Ships

There have been a few notable exceptions, namely one album entitled German Children in Norway, which seems to detail an event in which a ship full of German children sailed to Norway in order to play summer-time outdoor games with Norwegian children.  The best page was as follows: on top a large landscape photograph of Norwegian mountains, below two smaller photographs, one of two boys wresting to the death, the other of the same boys with their arms around each other's shoulders smiling.  The caption was something like, "German and Norwegian children are friends."

Occasionally there are singular gems within an album.  Like the album with a table of contents.  My favorite listing was something like Luftballon, which I assumed to mean War Balloon, the idea of which is hysterical unto itself, but exciting because it mean there would probably be a photograph of a German War Zeppelin!

Oh boy!  A zeppelin!


















Apart from these occasional treasures, I can always count on the albums themselves having some fabulous endpapers.  Endpapers, for ye who are not familiar with them, are the leaves in a book in the front before the title page and in the back after the text.  One half is pasted to the inside cover (a pastedown) and the other is free (a flyleaf).  They are what you see right when you open a book cover.  Historical endpapers are fab - below you can check out a selection of the Kaiser's albums' endpapers.

Note: the second one down is currently my favorite of the bunch.






































































4 comments:

Michael said...

luft == air
kreig == war

Jessica said...

I thought it was probably meant air balloon, because of luftwaffe, but I thought war balloon sounded so much more dramatic! And I'm sure the Kaiser would have loved more drama.

Ynn said...

How did I know that Michael would be the one to correct you on that one? That's my boy! I like the third endpaper down. Nothing like that anymore. Thought of you this morning as I checked in some of my new orders for school. I see some titles there that I think you would like!

Mum said...

I agree with Lynn on the wallpaper. My favorites are the 3rd and 1st ones.