Wednesday 30 May 2012

Page 1 - finished


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All three pelisses (long outdoor coats for women) are actually historical ones, even though only the woman in the middle of the third panel is wearing a pelisse from 1811 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelisse). The other two coats both date back to 1812 (http://www.fashion-era.com/images/RegencyRom/1812-blue-pelisse-collar.jpg and http://janitesonthejames.blogspot.de/2011_09_01_archive.html), so there is a slight historical inaccuracy here.
The design of the blue reticule (a little handbag for ladies) shown in the last panel is inspired by a photo by  Rachel Holkner, which can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rachelholkner/1486973717/

Tuesday 1 May 2012

Page 1 - Ink and Informations

Some notes regarding a number of details...

The newspapers shown in the last panel are, from bottom to top, The London Gazette, the Haarlemsche Courant (Harlem courier), the Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen (Royal privileged Berlin newspaper of state affairs and academic things) a.k.a. the Vossische Zeitung, and the Gazeta Warszaska (Warsaw Gazette).
Who has a close look at them will quickly see which year and month it is.
The card game in the same pictures actually exist(ed). The whole deck of cards can be found here: http://riowang.blogspot.de/2010/12/cards-1-cards-as-literature.html It depicts characters from different plays by Shakespeare and dates back to the year 1787. Therefore it is already a bit antiquated by the time the story takes place, but out of convenience I simply assume that there might have been reprints.
What lays atop of the London Gazette and looks like a bun is, by the way, a pirozhki.

The German magazine in the panel next to this one is "Die Jahreszeiten. Eine Vierteljahresschrift für romantische Dichtungen" (The Seasons. A quarterly paper for romantic poetries) by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. To be precisely it is the Frühlings-Heft (Spring-Issue) in which Fouqué´s story "Undine" was published for the first time.
As I assume that most people (like me) are probably not familiar with the Russian language I might as well translate what is written at the bottom of the letter. It is the sender´s address: Hunter Street 2, Saint Petersburg. Back then the sender´s address was not written on the envelope, simply as no envelopes existed.

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