Bella Fromm’s Berlin Social Diary

Over the last four years, I’ve read a lot of memoirs and diaries written by people who lived in Berlin in the period between the two world wars. They are a wonderful source to use to enrich a story. They not only allow you to look at incidents from different perspectives but, depending on the…

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Beatrice Warde: “First Lady of Typography”

Those of you who read my previous post on Books Across the Sea have already been introduced (very briefly) to American writer and typographer Beatrice Warde (1900-1969). Like many writers, I have opinions about type fonts,* and I was fascinated to learn about the changing world of typography in the first half of the twentieth…

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Books Across The Seas

Rationing, food shortages, and the clever ways people got around them are major themes in books about the British home front in World War II, fiction and non-fiction alike. Packages from friends in the United States made life easier for a lucky few. (C.A.R.E. packages came after the war.) I recently learned that books from…

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