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Page from Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies (1773)

The Private Case is a collection of erotica and pornography held initially by the British Museum and, from 1973, by the British Library. The collection began between 1836 and 1870 and grew from the receipt of books from legal deposit, and from requests made to the police following seizures of obscene material. Access to the material in the Private Case was restricted. At its height numbering some 4,000 items, the contents of the Private Case shrank as works were moved to the general collection, and grew with the arrival of bequests and donations from collectors. From 1964, reflecting the changing social mores of the time, the library began to review the Private Case, allowing public access to its contents, a process that was completed in 1983. There have been no new entries since 1990 and all new erotic and pornographic material is put on open access in the general collection. There is no restriction on access to Private Case material, except for some items which are in a fragile condition. (Full article...)

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On this day

October 12

Emerson iron lung

1799 – Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin became the first woman to make a parachute descent, falling 900 metres (3,000 ft) in the gondola of a hot air balloon.
1890 – The Uddevalla Suffrage Association was founded in Uddevalla, Sweden, with the purpose of bringing about universal suffrage.
1928 – The iron lung (example pictured), a type of medical ventilator, was used for the first time, to treat an eight-year-old girl paralyzed by polio.
1933 – The United States Department of Justice acquired a military prison on Alcatraz Island, transforming it over the next year into the last-resort Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
1960 – Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reportedly pounded his shoe on a desk during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.

Demosthenes (d. 322 BC)
Aleister Crowley (b. 1875)
Muhammad Shamsul Huq (b. 1912)
Emily Hale (d. 1969)

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Today's featured picture

The bala shark (Balantiocheilos melanopterus) is a fish in the family Cyprinidae, and one of two species in the genus Balantiocheilos. It is found around the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Borneo. It has a silver body with black margins on the dorsal, caudal, anal, and pelvic fins. It has big eyes which it uses to find and catch its prey. The bala shark has a maximum length of 35 cm (14 in). Bala sharks are found in midwater depths in large and medium-sized rivers and lakes. They feed on phytoplankton, but mostly on small crustaceans, rotifers, and insects and their larvae. The bala shark is listed as a vulnerable species by the IUCN Red List, having become rare or extinct in many river basins of its native range. However, large numbers of the species are bred in captivity and exported from Thailand for the aquarium trade. This bala shark was photographed at Karlsruhe Zoo in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Photograph credit: H. Zell

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