About

Why “Barbarians Abroad”?

The inspiration for the name comes from a map in the Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography called “Migrations of the Barbarians.” Upon study, we realised that both of our families’ ethnicities can be summed up by the “Barbarians” listed on the map.

As “Migrations-of-the-Barbarians-dot-com” seemed too long of a web address to make people type out, we settled on Barbarians Abroad, incidentally giving a nod to Terry Pratchett in the process.

Our favourite Travelogues:
• Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole
• Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
• Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson
• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America by Bill Bryson

Colophon

Embellishments appear in this blog thanks to some very old books and the people who took the time to scan the images. We are grateful for Liam Quin and his website From Old Books. We found several useful items there:

• — A thistle from Im Wechsel Der Tage by Brennecke, Adolf (1885).
• — A typographic ornament (We call it “swirlycue”, because why not?) from Goethe’s Works [Goethes Werke] by Dünker, H. (Ed.) (1882).

Around 450 B.C.E., Herodotus produced a map of the then-known world, which we use as our background — not because we have any special love for it, but because it happens to still look like a map after we bleached and mangled the crap out of it in order to keep the words on top legible. The version we started with came from wikimedia. It was originally found in Putzger’s Historischer Schul-Atlas, published in 1877 by Friederich Wilhelm Putzger.

The quill pen is an illustration from an 1888 jewel called Gems of Flourishing by Charles Paxton Zanner. The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting run a delightful website with far more than you ever wanted to learn about the creative art of penmenship.

The banner font is Vinque from 1001 Fonts. For the dropcaps and titles, we chose Black Chancery by Doug Miles from the same website.