#old document

(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

...Unless they were prostitutes, women were excluded from coffee houses and they let their resentment be known: in An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex in 1696, an indignant Mary Astell wrote: “A coffee house habitué is someone who lodges at home, but he lives at the coffee-house. He converses more with newspapers, gazettes and votes, than with his shop-books, and his constant application to the publick takes him off all care for his private home. He is always settling the nation, yet cou’d never manage his own family.”

Astell was merely chiming with all the other wives left at home with their chores and cups of tea; in 1674 there had been the vitriolic The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, in which wives argued that their husbands were forever absent from the home and family, neglecting their domestic duties – “turning Turk”, and all for “a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water”.

This Just In: The Glorious ‘King’ Threatens to Remove his Protection!

Happy New Years! As you may remember our Xmas list included more than a few items to feed Glorious Revolution collection cravings, so here is one of the gifts that turned up under out tree, hot out of the Santa’s mitten.

Titled, His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech in the House of Lords, to the Lords and Commons Assembled at Westminster the Eighteenth Day of February, 1688/9, William issues a vailed threat to withdraw his forces to Holland unless Parliament is ‘sensible,’ reminding them of the ‘dangers’ that face them, and the importance of a ‘good settlement at home.’

The booklet consists of two pages that are bound together by applying a glue to the doubled over left edges of the sheets. It is very clean and appears to have never been bound into a larger collection of similar pamphlets, or broadsides.    

A fake blueprint I made for a character. Also my header pic, if you haven’t seen it. The language is mine, I made it up my freshman year.

Fun tip: you can make any paper look old if you paint it with coffee. Also it smells good pretty much forever.

This Just In: William Gloriously Gabs at London Aldermen!

The Glorious Revolution collecting continues, and this is our newest acquisitions hot out of the courier’s hand.

Titled, Divers of the Members of the Parliaments in the Reign of the late King Charles the Second, and the Aldermen and Common Council of The City of London, pursuant to His Highness the Prince of Orange's Desire, meeting at St. James’s the 26th December 1688, William seeks the advice on achieving his Declaration of Reasons, ultimately leading to the acceptance of the Declaration of Rights on February 13th of 1689.