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Document: Happy Birthday, James Joyce
Image courtesy Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.; document now part of a private Joyce collection in New York. There’s so much to celebrate today, February 2, the birthday of James Joyce. On January 1 of...
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Comedies Are Too Depressing, and Other News
Chuchin the Clown, via Wikimedia Commons Are today’s most prestigious “comedies” too depressing? The Los Angeles Public Library is soon to offer high school diplomas. (You can’t just check them out for...
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Welcome to Wellcome
Thomas Burke after Philipp Reinagle, Cupid inspiring plants with Love, in a tropical landscape, 1805, via Wellcome Images. Enjoy viscera? Of course you do! And you’re in luck: as of yesterday, London’s...
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Learn to Figure Skate the Old-Fashioned Way
Frontispiece from A System of Figure-Skating If you’re like me, the Olympics have borne in you one mighty, overriding desire: to become a strapping world-class professional figure-skater. Well, we’re...
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A Glorious Figure of Young Manhood
“HE WAS A GLORIOUS FIGURE OF YOUNG MANHOOD” “IT DARTED TOWARD THE PLATE, BREAKING INTO A WIDE OUTCURVE” “IT WAS THE LONGEST HIT THAT EVER HAD BEEN MADE ON THE POLO GROUNDS” “JOE CAUGHT IT SQUARE ON...
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A Practical Handbook on the Distillation of Alcohol from Farm Products
It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription:...
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Corpulent Coriolanus
Yesterday, the Folger Shakespeare Library released some eighty thousand images into the Creative Commons, a deluge of bardic miscellany from which the Internet may well never recover. There are...
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The Production of Dairy Cows as Affected by Frequency and Regularity of...
It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription:...
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Blinded by Coffee
Two ordinary humans soon to have their vision sucked out of them by coffee, villainous coffee. Sadie Stein wrote earlier today about Balzac, who was famously enamored of coffee—especially coffee on an...
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Typographic Sanity
“The Blue Streak Comet,” a Linotype machine. There’s a post over at Print Magazine about Frank Romano’s new book, History of the Linotype Company, which chronicles the rise and decline of the Linotype,...
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The Literary Agent of Yore (Unspeakable Rascal!)
An illustration by Lauren Stout for Lawton Mackall's Bizarre, 1922. My continuing odyssey across the World Wide Web—I’ll read it all, someday—has yielded these two gems from the public domain, both...
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The Not-So-Ghastly Ghosts of Arthur B. Frost
These are a few of Arthur B. Frost’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s “Phantasmagoria,” as collected in Rhyme? And Reason? in 1884. Frost was part of the Golden Age of American Illustration; he...
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Congressional Districting in Iowa
It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription:...
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Straw Hats: Their History and Manufacture
It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription:...
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Things to Know About Trademarks
Ferdinand Max Bredt, Couch with Sleeping Lady, date unknown.It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific...
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The Square Root of Two
Joaquín Agrasot y Juan, Las Dos Amigas, 1866.It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in...
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And So Say All of Us
A birthday from Mr. Belvedere, one of TV’s many disquieting alternate universes.Television Land (not to be confused with the ever-sadder TV Land) is a foreign country: they do things differently there....
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Cold Storage, Heating, and Ventilating on Board Ship
Augustus Egg, The Travelling Companions (detail), 1862, oil on canvas.It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most...
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History of the Beef Cattle Industry in Illinois
Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer), 1856.It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most...
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I’m Not Dead Yet
The nineteenth-century obsession with premature burial.Antoine Wiertz, The Premature Burial, 1854.I was eleven when the family cat died—we found her on the cold concrete floor of the garage—but once...
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