Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐 @bibliolater@social.cleverlibre.org

Writing a letter was the start of a new communication flow. Like this writer in 1580, you needed paper, ink, a quill, and the right technique to fold your letter, and make it ready for transport. Fancy a try folding? http://letterlocking.org/about

Anyway, receiving and sending private and business letters was a time consuming activity. In the image you see opened and sealed letters waiting for further steps within the postal distribution systems of the time:

https://mastodon.social/@dbellingradt/109880812249342239

But more often letters were transported with horses - in a postal system running on horses. Every letter mentioned, used or depicted in a source from Early Modern Europe reminds us: these paper goods were moved from various postal services connecting Europe and beyond.

Every! letter! tells! a! material! story! of! transport!

This is how a “postal knapsack” (in German: Felleisen) looks like. In these bags the letters of the early modern postal services were transported. Bonus: a post horn!

So letters were transported goods. And this transport was sometimes a walking messenger: The man imagined on this Einblattdruck was part of the postal and messenger systems working in Europe. These services used horses, and less often couriers (Postboten: "Postpot"). The letter he is holding in his hand delivers a message: "Gute zeitung auss Turckey und Ostindien". Any news was in contemporary German, a Zeitung. And these news were transregional partly global in scope. And always a paper letter.

The purpose of paper letters being sent within the Early Modern European territories from A to B seems to be clear - it was about communication. And this communication was a paper thing: locked paper letters, like the one highlighted in the images, needed to be transported. And this transport or distribution of (paper) letters relied in the Early Modern period always on postal and messenger services operating transregionally in Europe.

You've got mail. A paper letter. In Germany 1632.

#histodons, let's have a look at letters being written, transported, and read all over Europe. News flows, all over.

#OTD 24 July 1802 Alexandre Dumas was born. Son of the great general Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, Alexandre became one of the greatest authors of the 19th century, whose work The Three Musketeers & the Count of Monte Cristo remain classics.

Researchers have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells.

So what does this mean for science, and what ethical issues does it present?

@KLMacKay @Sydney_Uni
https://t.co/EYFCLBlc90

If you want to find your Twitter friends on Mastodon and the Fediverse, there's a tool that can help you do that:

➡️ https://fedifinder.glitch.me

FediFinder was created by @luca

(If you're wondering why it asks for authorisation, it's explained at https://social.luca.run/@luca/110768875074355454)

#FediTips #Twitter #Fediverse #Mastodon

The Language of Science

How the words we use have evolved over the past 175 years

🔗 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-language-of-science/

#science #language #scientists #scientist #scientificlanguage

Astronomer Vera Rubin was born #OTD in 1928.

Her work on galactic rotation curves became one of the main pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter, and she deserved a Nobel Prize for it.

Image: Vassar College / Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

New #ebook @gutenberg_org: Essays and soliloquies by Miguel de Unamuno https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71260

Ugaritic word of the day:
šḥr ("dawn).

(cover illustration by Markus Hedström)