Abecedarian : posts tagged coal

Found 15 posts tagged ‘coal’

Restoring the Lost Sense – April 8, 2029

From The Improvement Era, 1924.

[Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.]

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#vintage illustration #vintage ad #king #coal #1920s #illustration #ad

Restoring the Lost Sense – March 28, 2029

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From St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1906.

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#furnace #faces in things #devil #coal #political cartoon #1900s #vintage illustration #illustration

Restoring the Lost Sense – April 5, 2028

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From The Children's Newspaper, 1926.

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#vintage illustration #anthropomorphism #faces in things #coal #1920s #illustration #log

Restoring the Lost Sense – February 28, 2028

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"The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean." From Grimm's Fairy Tales Retold In One-Syllable Words, 1899.

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#vintage illustration #fairy tale #anthropomorphism #coal #1890s #illustration #bean #straw

Restoring the Lost Sense – October 29, 2026

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"The devil will work for you!" From Improvement Era, 1930.

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#vintage illustration #vintage ad #devil #coal #illustration #ad

I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought – May 1, 2026

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You can extract from alembic or jar

From the physical basis of black coal

Oil and ointment, wax and wine

And the lovely colors called aniline

You can make anything from a salve to a star

If you only know how, from black coal tar.

—Punch magazine, 1884

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#coal #poem

Yearbook Weirdness – June 13, 2025

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From Hampden-Sydney College's 1920 yearbook.

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*For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

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#vintage illustration #vintage yearbook #yearbook #coal

Restoring the Lost Sense – September 14, 2023

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"Work! Let any youth just turned eighteen try to out-shovel two man-grown coal-shovelers!" From John Barleycorn by Jack London and illustrated by H. T. Dunn, 1913.

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#vintage illustration #coal #illustration #wheelbarrow

Restoring the Lost Sense – October 28, 2022

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The demon of coal shortages falls to the winged wheel as a stoker battles the spirit of electricity. From Nebelspalter, 1917.

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#vintage illustration #political cartoon #demon #coal #electricity #illustration

Old News – December 14, 2021

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To paraphrase RuPaul, if you can't blow on the coals within, how the h--- you gonna blow on somebody else's coals? From The Improvement Era, 1969.

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#coal #vintage headline #headline

Restoring the Lost Sense – April 24, 2018

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It's not especially clear in the scan, but he's putting coal in the piano. From Le Rire, 1898.

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#vintage illustration #piano #coal

Restoring the Lost Sense – July 1, 2017

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"Oh, drat the smoke! I really must lay in some o' that antichrist coal they talk about." From The Sketch, 1896.

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#vintage illustration #smoke #coal #illustration #malapropism #malaprop

Indubitably (?) – January 22, 2016

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You already know the futility of taking "coals to Newcastle," but indubitably it's Bristol that's left cleaning up all that coal spilled on the road and laybys, as we see in Picturesque Antiquities of Bristol by John Skinner Prout, 1893.

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*If Merriam (or Webster?) is correct that indubitably is not the kind of word that gets used in everyday conversation, except perhaps for humorous effect, then insert comedy drum roll here.

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#coal

This May Surprise You – May 2, 2015

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You've heard of carrying "coals to Newcastle," but here is revealed how they get there: via cherubs. From Church Review, 1901. We recall Jonathan Caws-Elwitt's sitcom treatment: "Coles to Newcastle: Posh Londoner Dagobert Coles has hilarious misadventures adjusting to life in the North."