Dear reader, life is too short for crap books.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Civilized Oddities

While I post the occasional link to Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities, I cannot urge you strongly enough to stick this link in your bookmarks, your Bloglines, your Google Reader, or just drop by every now and again. I promise you will not be disappointed.

It's the blog of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and the posts highlight interesting documents and artifacts from their collection, and nearly every one is my new favorite.

However, it may take some doing to top The Book of Accidents: Designed for Young Children (1831). Imagine a 19th century Edward Gorey without a sense of irony - I've never laughed so hard.



Hats off to Tim Young and Nancy Kuhl, curators of the blog (among other things), whose finds consistently delight and amaze.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

You win the internet. This is the best thing I have ever seen. I would play with knives, get kicked by a horse, fall out of a carriage, bother the cook, climb trees, and scald myself with hot tea to have a copy of this book.

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Did you notice on the candles page where they said the fire (in her hair) might "communicate with her ruffles"???

mary_m said...

Mayhap it will someday come back into print. I couldn't find any used copies, and it appears that Yale and the American Antiquarian Society are the only libraries in the U.S. that have it.

Nutty.

The entry on climbing trees is my favorite, though it struck me as unreasonably harsh: "Never climb trees for any purpose whatever."

mary_m said...

Julie: Yes, right before it makes her curly hair "blaze up like a flash of powder!"

Anonymous said...

Don't let Potts see that ... he'll have to try all of them to see what really happens.

Brady said...

Persons making allegations about what Potts will and will not do would be well advised to send him a copy of the Runners-Up record before he does something rash.

Or put it on iTunes or something so's I can buy it.

Bob Timmermann said...

I know some very worried dogs.