A hi-res picture of a curious Staffordshire ceramic bear-jug, circa 1740.

“The Lost Path” (1920) by Charles M. Tuttle. Copyright-free, and suitable for use as a book cover for a book of Lovecraftian poetry or similar.

A Samuel Palmer etching for an anthology book of scenes from Shakespeare (Songs of Shakespeare, the Etching Club, 1843). It reminds me instantly of “the white wizard” scene in The Lord of the Rings.

Three Iron Age golden ‘torcs’ (neckwear) were discovered before Christmas by amateur metal detectorists in the Staffordshire Moorlands above Leek. In “a field on the northern outskirts of the town, near Rudyard” (Leek Post) and specifically “on the Heath family estate in Leek” (StaffsLive).

The Portable Antiquities Scheme is today assessing them as treasure, and curators at the British Museum consider them the… “earliest examples of Iron Age gold-work found so far in the UK”, dating from circa 250 to 400 B.C.

The torcs have been named the ‘Leekfrith Iron Age Torcs’ and will be on display at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent from 1st to 22nd March 2017. Abi Brown (Cons), Deputy Leader of Stoke-on-Trent City Council, said: “We have worked hard with partners to ensure such magnificent finds remain in Staffordshire and we would be thrilled for The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery to become custodians of another such important international discovery.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87o-w0xCj7s?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

A 1911 work by the visionary comic-strip and later stage-set artist Herbert Edmund Crowley (not to be confused with a boring occult loon also named Crowley). It looks like a pro-drugs poster from the dawn of the London counter-culture circa 1967, but appears to have been meant to be an embodiment of the evils of alcoholism in an era when the temperance movement was very strong. The rye, held aloft, makes rye whisky…

A biography of this British artist by Justin Duerr is in the making, circa early 2017, which seems to be the same as $100k crowdfunder The Temple of Silence: Forgotten Worlds of Herbert Crowley (2017, forthcoming).

Other than his own Portfolio of Symbolic Drawings and Portfolio of Decorative Drawings in the 1910s, the only other book I can find is Herbert Edmund Crowley Papers (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1968), although this latter is either a very rare exhibition catalogue or a ‘ghost book’ of the type that sometimes enters the bibliographic record.

A curious Toft plate from North Staffordshire, circa 1680. The imagery relates to the popular belief that King Charles II hid in an oak tree to escape the puritans of Oliver Cromwell, but it also seems to partake of the deeper Anglo-Saxon ‘Dream of the Rood’ tradition that conflated Christ, the cross and native trees. Since Charles is not just in the oak tree, but is the tree.

“Please help us to keep Josiah Wedgwood’s Vase in Stoke-on-Trent where it can be freely seen and enjoyed by all visitors to the Potteries Museums & Art Gallery forever.”

Seen above is a section of the First Days Vase (1769), photographed on display in the Potteries Museum. It shows the ancient heroes Oineus and Demophon. Oineus was said to have been taught the arts of the vine by Dionysos, and thus he later invented wine-making. Demophon was a hero of the Trojan War, being one of the soldiers inside the famous Trojan Horse – by which method he rescued his grandmother Aithra from torment in the city of Troy. Demophon was also the son of the Theseus, he who had famously braved the Minotaur in the Cretan maze.

Historical fiction writers may want to known how cock-fighting was done, in places such as Cock’s Yard in the old days of Burslem. New at the Hathi Trust, there’s a free scan of a book that lays out the whole thing: The art of cockfighting; a handbook for beginners and old timers.

Ugly and cruel, but a part of that bygone Victorian past that a writer might hang a novel, a play or a graphic novel on.

Stafford Shakespeare presents The Tempest at Stafford Castle, in 2017. Apparently it’s going to be a politically correct version.

Two more obscure locally-set novels, discovered. John Toft (b. Eric John Toft, 1933-), The Bargees (1969, J.M. Dent & Sons) and The Wedge (1972, W.H. Allen). Both book were from solid publishers of the time, indicating quality. The publisher blurb for The Bargees opens…

“Two Potteries children, Sheila and Ernie, are friends. Ernie is an orphan, and he and Sheila are friends of Liddy…”

I can discover no more, and the novel is decades out of print and unobtainable, though the cover art seems indicative. The last days of the genuine working life of the canals were a well chronicled topic in the 1960s, and served as a backdrop to a number of feature-films and novels.

The Wedge is a regional historical novel. A book review of the time stated it…

“describes life in the Potteries region in the 1920s and 1930s. … set in the Potteries in the period leading up to the Second World War, finds the provincial working class a delight to be among but grants its dilemmas.”

I also found a snippet of a review of The Wedge by a Midlands reviewer for Books and Bookmen. The reviewer had lived here in the 1930s, and though he enjoyed the writing style it seems he found the novel’s local colour and topography distinctly lacking…

“The setting is the Potteries, though apart from some exactly reproduced flashes of the local accent and the inevitable town names, it could be set anywhere in the industrialised Midlands.”

Toft was one of the many talented Potteries people who — while they could say they were “born in the Potteries” — left just as soon as the opportunity arose. One can’t blame them, but it may help explain the apparent lack of local colour in The Wedge. In Toft’s case he left via grammar school (presumably in Newcastle-under-Lyme), then Magdalen College Oxford, followed by “travel in the East” including a spell teaching English at the Malayan Teachers College. He wrote his fiction as “a lecturer at Brighton Polytechnic” and produced three novels in the late 1960s and early 70s, with The Bargees being his first. There was also a book of stories, The House of the Arousing (1974). A short account of him in Brighton is found in The London Review, 1981…

“Up in the attic of almost the last of those white terraces [in Brighton] lived the writer John Toft; we’d first met through a shared enthusiasm for [the Welsh Marches novelist] John Cowper Powys”

An addition to the “Characters page” for my novel The Spyders of Burslem, for Jimmy Tunnicliffe, the ‘cunning’ man. The picture is not quite my character, for reasons that reading the novel will reveal, but it’s certainly evocative of the sort of look and has a suitable slightly-fey pose — and the dress is certainly spot-on for the time the novel is set.

Picture: Besom maker on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire in 1867. From the collections of Staffordshire Record Office.