Foreign magazines (all languages)

This is a French government publication dating back to 1944. As the title suggests, some space is devoted to articles about Asia, though this issue is mainly about France. Understandable enough, one presumes, as this issue came soon after the liberation of Paris by Allied forces.
The photograph is taken from an inside page and shows a woman member of the Free French forces in Paris.

Non-fiction English in Sri Lanka

“Sindbad in Serendib” is one of those ‘must have’ books on the shelf even if you are not a collector of books on Sri Lanka. This is a collection of articles published in the newspapers over the years by Richard Boyle. It is very scholarly in approach but I never found it dry or boring.

Apart from the aforementioned Sindbad, articles cover, in exhaustive detail, the pearl fisheries of Ceylon, the :anaconda of Ceylon,” Galle in its heyday, the Nittaewo, a pigmy-sized aboriginal group of people said to have existed in ancient times, the archaeological site of Ritigala, Zoologist and artist Ernst Haeckel, and psychologist Carl G. Jung’s visit to Sri Lanka. Rich in anecdote and evidently the product of years of painstaking research, this is one book I’m really proud to have in my collection!

It is beautifully printed and contains many splendid illustrations, including the work of Gustav Dore, archaeologists  P. E. P. Deraniyagala and H. C. P. Bell, Ernst Haeckel, and others.

Publications on Sri Lankan cinema

Sri Lankan magazines in English

newspapers in English/Tamil/foreign languages

History through magazine covers

This Time magazine cover takes us back to the time of the Watergate scandal in the United States. Let's not forget that a couple of journalists were able to unsettle a presidency, and that neither journalist was kidnapped, assaulted or murdered because of this.

Children's books in all languages

 

This section of my virtual library and archives will feature what I have collected as children's literature. It will feature book covers (sorry, but I don't have the resources to scan entire books), pages from books, magazines and encyclopaedias. 

We start off with  the Sinhala version of Herge's 'Crab With the Golden Claws.' The cover looks gorgeous as in all Tintin books, but the inside pages are black and white. More than that, it's the poor printing quality which detracts from  the story. Still, any effort to bring Tintin to children who don't understand English in praiseworthy.

Next, we have two pages from a very old children's encyclopaedia. It introduces parts of an article about Lewis Carol, the author of Alice in Wonderland, with an illustration of the author made by a contemporary artist, as well less-than-actual size reproduction of the last and first pages of the very first handwritten manuscript of 'Alice in Wonderland.' Read the pages and you'll see that the original title was something else.