Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 31, 2026

Inside the UC Santa Barbara Lab Turning 78s Into Free Recordings

Dust-to-Digital spends a Friday morning at UC Santa Barbara with preservationist Ian Evans, touring the labs, cold vault and stacks of the archive that runs the Discography of American Historical Recordings, a database of more than 460,000 masters made during the 78rpm era. Dust-to-Digital's partnership with the university has put more than 10,471 recordings online free. In the Henri Temianka Audio Preservation Lab, Eric Ederer works through about twelve records an hour, around 4,500 this year, while students under associate editor Fran Smith decipher century-old Victor ledgers. A listener in Spain identified a test pressing UCSB knew only from old newspaper articles.

Read the story By Dust-to-Digital and April Ledbetter · Dust-to-Digital
Inside the UC Santa Barbara Lab Turning 78s Into Free Recordings

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Monte Verità's Anarchist Commune Ended Up as a Modernist Hotel 
A2 Type Builds Four Typefaces From the Louisiana Museum's Printed Archive 
Amy Sacker Designed More Than 345 Book Covers in Boston 
Amsterdam and Maastricht Built Isolated Estates to Retrain Families Judged Antisocial 
Aspen Golann Carves 17th-Century Embroidery Motifs Into Wooden Vessels 
Curator Tarini Malik Pairs Mohammed Joha and Ala Younis on What Buildings Remember 
Ramona Jingru Wang Asks Her Friends How They Would Live as Cyborgs 
In Uncool, Debora Brune Photographs 26 People With Disabilities 
An Archivist Assesses the Great 78 Project After the Takedowns 
A Shelburne Falls Church Sends Its 1883 Hook & Hastings Organ Out for a Year of Restoration 
The Misfits Cut Static Age in Twenty Hours and Waited Eighteen Years to Release It 
Five basehead AI Tools Tested for Curating Sound Effects Metadata 
Restoring a Bauer 707 AM Broadcast Transmitter Rescued From a Station Clear-Out 
A Philadelphia Contractor Fills a Sharswood Rowhouse With Signs and Primitives 
Bringing Back a 1987 Philips AV7300 Tuner to Turn Retro Computer RF Into Composite Video 
Isabella Stewart Gardner's Egyptian Objects, From Desert Sand to a Possible Forgery 
A Medieval Plague Flea Turned Up Inside a 13th-Century Missal in Melbourne 
The Women at the Edges of the Body Snatching Trade 
The Hull Truck Theatre Archive Gets Its First Box Listing 
A Worcestershire Family Archive Holds Henry Davies's Expedition Photographs From Burma and Yunnan 
Richard Donner's The Omen Still Knows How to Betray Its Catholic Imagery 
Fielder and Oppenheim's Elizabeth Holmes Film Devolves Into Metafiction 
A Book on Owen Roizman Shows How He Lit The Exorcist and The French Connection 
Restoring Doctor X, the First Horror Feature Shot Entirely in Colour 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 30, 2026

The Rhythm of the Grid: Art of Manga Teaches You to Read in Sequence

More than 600 original manga drawings have come to the Brooklyn Museum, hung to be read right to left. Seen side by side, they show how panel, line and rhythm turn still black-and-white pages into cinematic worlds, from Akatsuka Fujio's gag pages and Chiba Tetsuya's boxing to Oda Eiichiro's One Piece, with a Kinokuniya reading room at the centre. Through January 31, 2027.

Read the story By Small Revisions · Small Revisions
The Rhythm of the Grid: Art of Manga Teaches You to Read in Sequence

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Building Practitioners Say Buildings Are Seldom Evaluated Once People Move In 
How a Couple Carved an Ensuite Bathroom Out of a Bedroom Corner 
Three Type Designers Review the Cyrillic in Six Google Fonts Families 
The Herman Miller Picnic Posters Behind the Eames Institute's Own Annual Series 
At Tamworth's Textiles Triennial, the Jacquard Loom Appears as a Precursor to Computing 
Chicago Photographer Lali Khalid on Letting Her Sitters Choose How They Are Seen 
Nam June Paik's Friendly Robots, and What They Suggest About Living With AI 
Super-Veloz, the 1940s Spanish Type System That Built Letters From Modular Pieces 
Carmen Villain Built Memoria by Wearing Down Her Own Archived Recordings 
Jazz Journal Reprints Its 1986 Review of Steve Lacy's Soprano Album on Candid 
At Semibreve in Braga, Marta Salogni Plays Reel-to-Reels in a Seminary Chapel and Fennesz Joins an Orchestra 
Kinshasa Bands Build Their Instruments From the City's Scrap 
An 1880 Patent Model Shows How Inventors Fought the Potato Bug 
A Te Papa Intern Reflects on Working With the Museum's Pacific Collections 
A Reader Spots Dansco's Work in the Franklin Mint Album in Rockwell's The Collector 
The Automatic Balances That Weighed Britain's Gold and Silver Coins 
A Wedding at Sea, Lucille Lortel's Late Birth Certificate and NYPD Surveillance Files in New York's Archives 
How Chetham's Library's Books Have Been Bound and Rebound Since the 1650s 
A Wiltshire Conservator Cleans Corrosion From Roman Lead Curse Tablets 
Why Bladder Stones Plagued England for Centuries and Then Almost Vanished 
In The Calf Doll, a Haryana Farmer Makes a Doll From a Stillborn Calf's Hide So His Cow Will Milk 
Laika's Wildwood Is a Marvel of Handmade Stop-Motion, Held Back by Its Story 
How 1950s Theatres Sold The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Hammer's Frankenstein 
Laida Lertxundi on Starting Films From a Landscape and Working With Non-Actors 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 29, 2026

Durham Launches a New Jazz Festival in a City That Has Struggled to Keep a Scene

Frank Graham reports from the inaugural Durham Jazz Festival, held 23 to 25 October in a city he says has long struggled to sustain a thriving jazz scene, partly because audiences travel to Newcastle instead. Founded as a not-for-profit venture by Alan Patrickson, John Lyons and Richard Turner, it ran around 25 events over three days at ten venues, from Claypath Delicatessen, with room for about 30, to the Assembly Rooms. Graham hears Maja Bugge and Dave Evans play from Sortland, Sebastian Rochford's Finding Ways, the Pete Roth Trio with Bill Bruford and a sold-out Knats, and names the one programme clash he hopes the organisers will fix.

Read the story By Frank Graham · UK Jazz News
Durham Launches a New Jazz Festival in a City That Has Struggled to Keep a Scene

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Inside the Montreal Restaurant Rooms Designed by Atelier Zébulon Perron 
The London Museum's New Smithfield Home Puts a Window on the Thameslink Trains Below 
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Posters, and Who Got to Control the Picture 
The Wired Prototype Behind Herman Miller's Aeron Chair 
Fiona Crisp Remembers Christine Borland, the Artist Who Worked With Skeletons, Death Masks and Flax 
How Tina Barney's Mother, a 1930s Model, Shaped Her Fashion Photographs 
A Collector's Warehouse in Konin Shows 211 Marek Chlanda Drawings 
Carrie Mae Weems Casts Herself as the Main Character of Her Photographs at C/O Berlin 
Phil McDonald, Who Taped Revolver and Engineered Abbey Road, Has Died 
Parsons Rewires a 1900 Steere Organ in Avon, New York 
Shooglenifty's James Mackintosh Looks Back Over Thirty Six Years of Acid Croft 
A Small Ontario Museum Digitises Its Reel-to-Reel Oral Histories In House 
A Dubai Resident Turns His Family Home Into a Museum of Nearly Six Decades of Keepsakes 
The Co-Founder of Radical Glasgow Tours Opens Her Collection of Left-Wing Print 
Nine of Hedda Hopper's Hats Sit in Their Original Boxes Behind a Los Angeles Record Shop 
Typewriter Collectors Keep the Clack Alive in a Digital Age 
A New Stone Timeline Marks Lost Hicks Hall on St John Street 
Forged Letters and Fake Catholic Plots in Elizabethan England 
Lynn Hunt on How Napoleon Built Authoritarian Rule From Democratic Tools 
Thomas McKean's Library Company Share and His 1796 Borrowing Letter 
Paul Schrader at 80 on Mortality, Cheap Financing and Writing Taxi Driver as Therapy 
How a Flash Animation Craze Gave China Its First Wave of Indie Animation 
Chicago Film Archives on Five Nitrate Films It Is Saving, From a 1923 Wedding to a 1948 Sunbathers' Convention 
A Visit to Silver Salt Restoration as It Cleaned the 1958 Dracula Frame by Frame 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 28, 2026

Gulliver at 300, Seen Through a 1933 Pulp Story Set in the Year 3000

Tom Dillon, writing on the University of Liverpool's special collections blog, marks the 300th anniversary of Gulliver's Travels, first published on 28 October 1726, by turning to science fiction. Leslie F. Stone's "Gulliver, 3000 A.D.", printed in Wonder Stories in May 1933 with illustrations by Frank R. Paul, strands a space captain on Mars, where he is enslaved by six-inch green aliens and fights their enemies, six-inch copper aliens he names Lilliputians. Dillon reads the story as a critique of racism, notes that Swift both criticised colonialism and invested in the South Sea Company, and launches the library's digital exhibition Gulliver's Travels: Before and Beyond.

Read the story By Tom Dillon · Manuscripts and More
Gulliver at 300, Seen Through a 1933 Pulp Story Set in the Year 3000

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Yoav Liberman Teaches Students to Flatten Live Edge Slabs With a Router Sled at a Massachusetts Craft School 
A Footwear Designer Spent a Decade Photographing Paper Signs at Small Businesses 
How Peugeot Put the 205 GTI Into the Electric e-208 GTI Without Going Retro 
Reading the Window Bands of Alvar Aalto's House of Culture in Helsinki 
Hannah Hallermann Sews With a Bow and Arrow at the Miettinen Collection in Berlin 
Billy Adams Fires Each Piece Five Times and Removes Glaze After Every Firing 
Libby Rothfeld Shows Plaid Silhouettes of Men in Suits and Owala Thermos Lids at Bureau 
The ICA Boston Revisits One Show From Each of Its Nine Decades 
Samuel Adams's Second Violin Concerto, The Wheel, Comes Back to Where It Started 
Marc Weidenbaum on a Sardinian Drone Guitarist, a Hamburg Digitakt Player and a Solo Pedal Steel Guitarist 
Suzanne Nance Left Portland Radio to Run Wexford Festival Opera, Which Has No Endowment 
Bob Bert Played a Drum Kit Made From a Car Gas Tank in Pussy Galore 
A 1969 Canadian Quarter Struck Over a British Gold Sovereign Sells for $28,125 
An 81 Year Old Lincoln Collector Puts 184 String Holders and a Life of Finds on Show 
A Sydney, Nova Scotia Man Kept the Cameras His Customers Threw Away and Now Has More Than 175 
Mego Bought Science Fiction Licences to Protect Its Micronauts Line 
Jessie Carter Built and Ran Three Utah Airports, and Was Deputized to Keep a Military Contract 
Alexander's Cornbread Leads Buncombe County's Special Collections Manager Back to the Buncombe Turnpike 
Three Witnesses to Witton Hall, the House One Visitor Called the Strangest She Ever Saw 
A 1935 Pictorial Map Shows Southern California Edison's Electrical Service System 
Cruel Hands Was Shot Like a Western on Leica R Glass Amid Australia's Bushfire Smoke 
Three Reverse Shot Critics Revisit The Old Dark House, Magic and The Woman in the Yard 
King Vidor's Street Scene and the Long Afterlife of Elmer Rice's Brownstone Play 
Ashley Da-Lê Duong Scripted Every Camera Move to Film Her Father's Memoir of War and Revolution 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 27, 2026

A Plan in National Records of Scotland Shows the Royal Army Wheeling Into Order at Culloden

Ross, writing on the National Records of Scotland blog, presents a plan of the order of the Battle of Culloden, fought on 16 April 1746, as the third in a series on striking and interesting items the archive holds. The plan marks the point at which the Royal army wheeled into order of battle, just south of Castle Stuart, turning towards Castle Dalcross. The battle set the King's army under William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, against the Jacobite army under Charles Edward Stuart and lasted under an hour. About 1,250 Jacobites were killed, while the government force officially lost 50 men, with 259 wounded. The text comes from the archive's 2025 book Treasures of National Records of Scotland.

Read the story By Ross · National Records of Scotland
A Plan in National Records of Scotland Shows the Royal Army Wheeling Into Order at Culloden

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Charles C. Mann Reads a New Cooktop Surface as the Latest Chapter in Porcelain's History 
Elizabeth Farrelly Argues That Urban Utopias Threaten the City as a Public Realm 
Rashida Ng Reviews MoMA's Architects of Liberation and Wants More on Who Built and Lived in It 
David Jonathan Ross Explains the Decisions Behind His Slight Chance Stencil Typeface 
At The Hepworth Wakefield, Mrinalini Mukherjee's Hemp, Clay and Bronze Sit Beside Four Pioneering Women Sculptors 
Tessa Boffin's Queer Photographic Archive Becomes a Living Presence in a Touring Exhibition 
John Gossage Photographs Found Objects as Sculpture in a Book Dedicated to Anne Truitt 
Lari Pittman on Working Alone, His Mother's Voice and a Fall From an Eight-Foot Ladder 
Six Scary Sea Songs for Halloween, Including Field Recordings by Lomax, Flanders, Creighton and Leach 
Alex Weiser on Setting Yiddish Poetry Ahead of His Clarinet Concerto's US Premiere at Carnegie Hall 
Joseph Trapanese Detuned an Orchestra and Turned the Violins to the Back of the Room to Score Whalefall 
Lisa Conway on Playing Live With a Reel to Reel Machine That Might Not Work 
Inside the Grolier Club, the Manhattan Club for Book Collectors Founded in 1884 
A Collector Sells 100 Pieces of the Houdini Collection He Spent Five Decades Building 
A Living Dead Dolls Collector Examines and Repairs the Wonderland Hatter Sybil 
Revs Institute Hangs the Original Body of Its 1957 Cooper-Climax Above the Chassis 
Late Medieval Writers Cast God and Kings as Keepers of Unreliable Clocks 
The Bronx Mansion a Pro-Slavery Merchant Built at Oak Point and a Cuban Patriot Bought 
A Doctoral Researcher Reads the Uncatalogued Papers of Feminist Librarian Claire Madden 
A Woods Hole Librarian Finds the Idea Behind 'Study Nature, Not Books' in a 1666 Journal Article 
David Bolen Hid About Eight DV Cameras in New Orleans Houses and Printed Primetime to 16mm 
Vitagraph's 1907 Disintegrated Convict Escapes Jail as a Mannequin, a Rope and a Stack of Blocks 
Farouk Kannout Questions an ElevenLabs Credit on William Greaves's Once Upon a Time in Harlem 
A Lost 1924 Universal Melodrama Was Restored From a 16mm Show-at-Home Print 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 26, 2026

Henry Wessel's Career Laid Out in Prints and Books at the Grolier Club

Loring Knoblauch reviews Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books at the Grolier Club in New York, on view until November 14. The show gathers 53 black-and-white and color photographs by Wessel, drawn entirely from the collection of Jack Gray, once his student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Gray owns the entire 27-image Incidents set from 2012, which Wessel called fictional analogies, leaving the viewer to make sense of the possibilities. Glass cases intermingle prints with magazines, books and maquettes. With no comprehensive institutional retrospective since Wessel died in 2018, Knoblauch finds the show expands beyond his early California work to Richmond houses, Los Angeles at night and Las Vegas.

Read the story By Loring Knoblauch · Collector Daily
Henry Wessel's Career Laid Out in Prints and Books at the Grolier Club

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Far Studio Scales Down an Expansive Philadelphia Family Home 
Diller Scofidio + Renfro Take the Texas Metal Shed as the Model for Rice University's Arts Hub 
Show Not Show Turns a Dutch Design Week Press Dinner Into an Exhibition on Boardroom Power 
How Penguin's Design Director Takes Books to Where Young Adults Already Are 
Eighteen Photographers Take Over the Walls of Central Tokyo 
Kristina Rozhkova's Photobook Sets Human and Animal Bodies Side by Side 
Following a Kentucky Broom From the Broomcorn Field to the Home 
Antoine De Winter Reveals Photographs of the Covered Rhone Glacier With Carbon From Its Surface 
Satoko Fujii on Writing for Her Orchestras and Composing Every Morning 
landtitles Made an Ambient Record on an Offline MacBook Running Old Max/MSP 
Three Ensembles Play Reich's Music for 18 Musicians Back to Back at the Park Avenue Armory 
An Organbuilder Sorts Out What It Means to Restore, Renovate or Refurbish a Pipe Organ 
An Engineer Rebuilds a Cheap Zorki Rangefinder to Take Leica M Lenses 
Beamish Reads 1950s Teenage Life Through Oral Histories and Its Costume Collection 
A Clock Collector Readies a 1930 Kienzle Clock as a Gift 
HYT's Co-Founder Lucien Vouillamoz on Inventing a Watch That Tells Time in Liquid 
A Hagley Librarian Dates an Undated Paris Pin Seller's Broadside 
A Fourteen Year Old Rides to the Top of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and Seals a Wish in Her Diary 
A Forty Stanza Song Sheet Gives the Murder of Count Floris V in Full 
An Exeter Volunteer Builds a Wartime Exhibition From a Blitz Account and Bomb Damage Photographs 
David Cairns on Men of the Lightship and the Cutting of Stewart McAllister 
Three Films From the Woodstock Film Festival as Meira Blaustein Retires 
Paolo Strippoli on Horror as Cinema's Most Noble Genre 
Ariana Martinez Rewatches Peggy Sue Got Married at Forty 
Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / October 25, 2026

Inside Church Rate Corner, a Late Baillie Scott House in Cambridge

William Fawcett visits Church Rate Corner, a late masterpiece by the Arts-and-Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott, set in central Cambridge with no street frontage. Designed in 1924 for Marjorie Duckett as her married home with Arthur Sewell, who died in 1926, it later housed Joan and Stanley Bennett for more than 50 years and now belongs to Michael Nedo and Gillian Moore, only its third owners. Photographed by Will Pryce, the piece walks the almost symmetrical garden front, the south-facing rooms, the plain timber stair and oak-board doors, and a gravity-fed heating system still in operation. Diane Haigh, the author's late wife, was conservation architect for its 1992 restoration.

Read the story By William Fawcett · Country Life
Inside Church Rate Corner, a Late Baillie Scott House in Cambridge

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How 1,288 Acrylic Panels Make the Kunsthaus Graz Read as One Blue Mass 
A Draughtsman Left His Fingerprints on the Whitechapel Gallery Drawing 
Nineteen Modern Tombs in Milan's Monumental Cemetery, From Ponti to BBPR 
Carlo Scarpa's Villa Ottolenghi Is Dug Into a Lake Garda Vineyard 
Matthew Connors Spent Twelve Years Photographing Cities That Have Much in Common 
John Flaxman's Plaster Models Make the Case for a Neglected Neoclassical Master 
Thirty Photographers Spent a Month Shooting Alana Jessica Martin 
Four Photographs From the V&A Collection Stop Tennis Long Enough to See It 
Ex Cathedra Surround St Martin-in-the-Fields for Tallis's Forty-Part Spem in Alium 
Jacques Greene Explains How a Club Track Is Built for the DJ 
Shovel Dance Collective Pulverise Old Reels and Splice Penny Whistle With Static on Their Third Album 
Norwegian Grind Band Beaten to Death Fold Reggaeton, Sax and Folk Into Their Seventh Album 
A Collector Tracks Down the Victorian Velvet Cuffs She Left at a Detroit Flea Market 
How Australian Car Ads Were Copied From Overseas Brochures 
Three Replica Hornbooks Hide Inside Cardiff's Copy of an 1897 History 
Winterthur's Conservators Go Back to the Specialists Henry Francis du Pont Hired Before It Opened 
Essex Record Office Shows Its Colchester Oyster Feast Programmes 
Spanish and Indigenous Writers Saw Different Ants in Sixteenth-Century New Spain 
Penn Looks at an Italian Copy of the Rhetorica ad Herennium 
Cardiff City Paid Arthur Fish One Pound a Week in 1914 
Sky Hopinka Filmed a Three-Day Powwow Without a Single Retake 
Olivia Colman's Fisherwoman Orders a Husband Woven From Wicker 
A Thai Producer Spent Nine Years Getting 9 Temples to Heaven Made 
Brussels' Cinematek Names Its Library for Bordwell and Thompson, Who First Worked There in 1979 

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