Zollernschloß, Balingen. Home of great little collection of weights and measures sponsored by the local scale-maker, Bezirba.

Basel (?), c. 1850, Historisches Museum, Basel

Thanks to my profile on academia.edu, I’ve recently gotten to correspond about this old friend, the subject of my master’s thesis. It appeared last year in an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, its first loan (I believe) away from the Ashmolean since the First World War.

I remember a professor of mine once describing the experience of seeing paintings he had written a book about in a museum after many years. The expectation that the painting must recognize you in some way, be grateful for your attention, a reciprocation of your own feelings of familiarity. The humility that comes upon realizing that you are, of course, nothing to the object, just another museum visitor, and that it remains ever as inscrutable to you, despite the years of thought and labor.

A failed attempt at scanning in the Uni Bib. I set the overhead machine to “color” and it kept zooming out to capture my yellow sweater sleeve and ruddy hand. The book is The Warning Carriers by Judy Jowett.

 Saw this ad recently in a German magazine. Degussa has showrooms in Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt, where the company originated. They deal in gold and silver bars and coins. Metal refinery and bullion production are now handled by Swiss firms, but ingots still bear the Degussa insignia.

[update] I’ve since learned of the role Degussa played in handling chemicals and precious metal during the Second World War, discussed in Peter Hayes’s From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (2004).