stories of their makers and wearers. In a new, occasional series for Times Past, we will be sharing some of those Tales From the Wardrobe. Rebecca Quinton David Kemp began by manufacturing shawls in 1832. He went on to employ 250 staff at his premises at 37 Buchanan Street, now part of the Fraser’s department store building. The premises were huge – five levels of showrooms, fitting rooms, and a factory making “mantles, costumes, millinery, lingerie, silks, dress goods, shawls, and furs” according to the 1888 publication Glasgow To-day: Metropolis of the North. This directory describes the building as a “trade palace of which there are not a few in Glasgow, though certainly none to surpass this.”
Some relatively limited run books, certainly aimed at the plastic modelling world do command some very high prices once out of print - Duel in the Mist Vol 1 springs to mind - a fifty pound book on first release and now fetches an excessive price in comparison if one comes up.
That said I have seen as above some highly inflated prices for some for which there must be a good reason and the listing explanation seems a viable one given the article (book) concerned.
So, my copy of Malcolm Darches book will sit on the shelf until I slip off the old perch and then perhaps somone will make a killing
Apindra Swain’s artwork, one of five Covid-inspired pieces from India acquired by Glasgow Museums. Pic: Glasgow Museums IT has become THE phrase of the pandemic, two little words that sum up the last year in a nutshell - Stay Home. An artwork which spells it out with human figures is one of five acquired by Glasgow Museums, which is collecting material to record the Covid-19 pandemic for future generations. Apindra Swain’s piece joins work by Kalyan Joshi, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, Bahadur Chitrakar and Heera Devi, in the city’s World Cultures collection. Unique to Scotland, the collection is a combination of works on cloth and on paper. Each showcases a distinct style of traditional folk and tribal craft from a different region of India.
Alison Watt There s a large Alison Watt painting called Phantom, which lurks quietly on a stairwell in Glasgow s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. It always takes me by surprise; like all good phantoms should. This work always appears to me to be entirely composed and ethereally beautiful. There s an otherness about it too; an intensely sensual quality which suggests the most intimate parts of a woman s body. Part of a series which combined Watt s investigation of the use of fabric in art, it is a personal response by Watt to Francisco de Zubarán s seventeenth century painting, Saint Francis in Meditation, which is in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Watt has said in the past that she considered Phantom to be the most resolved work of a series which she made while she was artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in 2007.
Cashing in the Empties. Malcolm R Hill. Pic: Glasgow Museums CHILDREN at the window of an empty tenement; cashing in the empties on Acadia Street; shop assistants in a grain store, smiling for the camera… This is Glasgow in the 1970s, a time when ordinary Glaswegians went about their daily life as their city changed around them. These fantastic photographs are the work of Partick Camera Club’s 1970s Photographic Surveys, held now in Glasgow Museums’ collection. They were turned into a book in 2011, called 1970s Glasgow: Through the Lens, a fascinating snapshot of the city at a time when it was rapidly evolving.