Nabokov's St. Petersburg house

Before the revolution, Vladimir Nabokov's (author of Lolita, Ada,Pale Fire and many other wonderful novels) family lived in this estate in St. Petersburg. They were forced to flee by the Bolshevics, and his father was assassinated in the 1920s. Nabokov lived the rest of his life without stepping foot in Russia.

Hogarth's Ilustration "Gin Lane."

Gin: apparently a whole lot of trouble in ye olde London.

Illustration for the Day

Here's an illustration from Edward Lear's 1894 Laughable Lyrics. A strange sight, without context. A public domain image found at zorger.com.

Illustration

While not exactly illustrations, here are two photographs- taken by the EPA in 1970s - of a house built with beer bottles. It's that kind of day, isn't it? Found at the Public Domain Images blog, a great site.

In the end, it looks like something from a sci-fi film:

An Illustration

Today, instead of a poem or a first line, we have a cool old illustration from Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark." Pretty wild, huh? I've loved the old illustrations from Carroll books since I was a kid. They're so funny, and so weird.

-Ben