Scrap Book

Jules Guerin, The Sphinx, 1908
(illustration from Robert Hitchens, Egypt and its Monuments)

In the main, I try to restrict the images on this blog to my own photographs. Copyright and "intellectual property" theft is a serious issue, and too many people on the Web take the view that stealing and republishing other people's images or words is not really wrong. Oh, yes it is.

Proper acknowledgment softens the blow, but using someone else's work without their permission is theft, pure and simple. Every harmless blogger who believes "content wants to be free" simply emboldens those giant corporations (naming no names) which would love to take our "content" for nothing, and then exploit it for massive financial gain. Content may want to be free, but content providers want to eat.

Having said that (ahem) I do keep a digital scrapbook of images that take my fancy, in the same way that people have always done a literal "cut and paste" job with bits of magazines and ephemera. It's one of the best ways of refining your own eye, and also of remembering things, which is more important to the eye-refining process than people think. Just as a diary can remind you of who you were and what you used to think, a scrapbook reminds you of what has pleased or intrigued your eyes. Memory is intrinsic to learning.

Ernest Ashton, Evening at the Pyramids
photogravure, 1897

Of course, kids these days rarely have to learn anything, in the true sense of committing complex and difficult things to memory. Us over 50s had to learn "by heart" whole poems and dramatic speeches, conjugations and declensions, multiplication tables, mathematical proofs, geographical names, etc., etc. Getting these into your head, where they would form the rich raw material of intelligence, was once a large part of the schooling process.

Indeed, before the advent of cheap printed books, the ability to memorize improbably vast chunks of information was the chief skill of the scholar. No longer. We've let ourselves off the hook of rote learning -- no more tears, no more boredom! -- but the analgesic gain will never balance the mnemonic loss. Wikipedia is not there when you sleep. You know how your phone battery fails if it's not repeatedly emptied and fully recharged? That's your brain, that is. Harumph.

Anyway. For a change, all these images are from my digital scrap book. If I have infringed anyone's copyright, do let me know.

A Kodak No. 1 circular image, Sphinx and Pyramids

The Nebra Sky Disk

A Christmas Ghost