Selected Graphic Elements
When we see some nice drop caps or other graphic elements in an old book, we sometimes rescue them from oblivion and share them here.
When we see some nice drop caps or other graphic elements in an old book, we sometimes rescue them from oblivion and share them here.
Images of decaying daguerreotypes from Mathew Brady’s NYC Studio, circa 1850.
These illustrations from a 15th-century book show various areas of hell, purgatory, and heaven, based on Dante’s musings in The Divine Comedy. Hell and purgatory were painted by Priamo della Quercia, and Giovanni di Paoli di Grazia did heaven.
If you need, or just want, 14th-century images of grunty or otherwise irritated creatures, you’ve come to the right place.
All of these books can be borrowed from the Internet Archive by anybody anywhere. All it takes is an email address to open an account. Depending on the book: 1. you can borrow by the hour (and read online) or 2. you can borrow for 14 days (in which case you can also download if you want) or 3. you can read and download at any time without borrowing (as the book has no copyright).
Selected graphics from The Black Cat short story magazine, September 1905. Mostly vintage ads we liked.
Selected graphics (ads, drop caps, and end-piece decorations) from The Black Cat short story magazine, October 1904. Mostly vintage ads we liked.
Gems Press specializes in creating and publishing curated gems of information resurrected from old books and documents.
This is that rare book from Gems Press — one that hasn’t been lovingly resurrected from the past, but which was written new by yours truly. It started as a bedtime story for my kids and took on a life of its own — becoming an exciting chapter book for all ages. In this humorous fantasy adventure, Marcus Realwright, traveling elf-magician, learns more than he ever imagined possible about the effects of casting a spell in the presence of a disbeliever in magic. His companion in The Book of Glimmer, a tabby cat called Stub, used to be Eddie, the young Earl of Stubbenfield — but oops, he lied about his (dis)belief in magic, and so Marcus’s spell has gone awry and turned the young Earl into a cat. No one is happy about it, except Stub’s mom, who is thrilled he’s now rid of his many unsuitable girlfriends…. See on Amazon.*
From Gems Press. A new, true, and valuable addition to the amount of fun and wit loose in the world! Courtly Quips & Gentry Gems: The Best of Early English Wit, Volume I, is nearly three hundred pages of authentic quips, jests, bon mots, quotations, anecdotes, maxims, etc., from the 1700s and 1800s in England. Many of these appear here for the first time in a modern digitized format. At Gems Press, we save the parts worth saving and bring those to you, nicely formatted. After hundreds of years, these long-lost words are fresh once again, resurrected to make their charming way in the modern world. Hope you don’t mind bawdy! See on Amazon.* Get a Sampler PDF of the first 70 pages of the book free when you sign up for our mailing list.
From Gems Press. A fascinating new resource for historians and people who like well-reasoned arguments on weighty issues — published in 1773. A Collection of Tracts, on the Subjects of Taxing the British Colonies in America, and Regulating Their Trade.: Volume I is now available in both Kindle and paperback versions. Finally, we’ve created the first version in modern typeface and the first true digital version of these classic contemporary writings about the issues preceding the U.S. Revolutionary War. Both the Kindle and the paperback contain the full contents of the original Volume I — 83,000+ words, including all the footnotes. For the first time, you can read this book without having to deal with those funny-looking s’s. See on Amazon.*
From Gems Press. With Gem’s Fascinating Leisure Reader: Volume One, our aim is to delight and amaze you with the most interesting anecdotes in existence — ones that you would otherwise never encounter. These gems don’t see the light of day often enough — if ever — because they appear in books that are no longer new. They sink into oblivion, and all their sparkle is wasted. This volume takes you on a visit to Heaven and Hell (two historic Montmartre nightclubs that sound like way more fun than any clubs we know today). We’ll take you to mid-19th-century India as a doctor tries to solve the mystery of what causes malaria (why does staying awake when traveling through malarial areas help protect you from the miasma?). Among the 36 stories in this book, you’ll find advice — maybe not-so-good advice — for writing love letters, even if you’re not yet acquainted with the person you admire. You’ll find out how a girl born in prison became the wife of a king, and why a baseball legend likes to bully the catcher. See on Amazon.*
From Gems Press. Gem’s Fascinating Leisure Reader: Volume Two shares the best of our recent discoveries from deserving but long-neglected texts. This volume includes three dozen of our new favorite anecdotes and passages, ones we think you’ll really enjoy and find interesting, gathered into book form. Gem’s Readers are basically bathroom readers for smart people. Some of the excerpts are funny; some are rather odd or alarming (although they should not give you nightmares); but they are all, in their way, fascinating. Some are poignant, some are wise, some bits may even be enlightening or may — uh-oh — give you ideas, but the unifying thread is that we found them all well worth reading. So we rescued them from oblivion and present them here for your delectation. See on Amazon.*
From Gems Press. This lecture on “sanitary science” by Dr. J. Fletcher Horne in the year 1885 has a great deal of smart thinking on the idea of keeping your home healthy — and most of it is extra-helpful because it is advice barely mentioned nowadays, despite representing basic tenets of health. For instance, his extensive emphasis on ventilation is literally refreshing. And his statement that the human body is “but a mass of hidden drains, large and small and, how directly the health of the individual is dependent on their condition!” rings true and is a concept worth thinking about in relation to our health. Here’s how Dr. Horne sums up a healthy house….See on Amazon.*
From Gems Press. What could a physician from the year 1830 have to say that could possibly be of use to us today? How about, “Take a bath”? Author J.W. Ford, M.D., explains why sometimes some people should take a cold bath, and some should take a tepid bath, but pretty much everyone should have a vapour bath, also known as a steam bath, as often as possible. It’s no coincidence that the doctor had a thriving business administering “Simple and Medicated Vapor Baths” at his residence on Tyler Street in Lowell, Massachusetts. Dr. Ford takes an interesting look at the skin as an organ of exhalation and the damage to internal organs that he says can result when the skin can’t breathe properly…. See on Amazon.*
From Gems Press. Amos G. Wells’ classic book from the year 1910, How to Work, is a smart, useful, and enjoyable read. It’s full of good life advice, as if from an experienced friend whom you like to hang out with. The author is a Christian, and his faith is central to the book, yet the book is full of practical advice, and the faith it talks about could equally be any authentic religious or spiritual conception of Christ Consciousness, or God – there is no doctrine or dogmatism in this book…. The sincerity of Mr. Wells’ good-natured attempt to help us all along in life comes shining through…. See on Amazon.*
I’ve read the entire 21-volume Brother Cadfael series twice. Set in a 12th-century monastery and surrounding towns, it’s never too violent or horrible, and is well-written and entertaining. The Internet Archive has multiple copies of most of these books. Whenever possible, I’ve linked to a copy that’s available for 14-day borrow.
A list, in no particular order, of 64 notable books you can borrow free from the Internet Archive. Fiction titles are in brown. The books on this list are in addition to the individual books featured in our Books to Read Free posts and in our Gallery of More Notable Books You Can Read for Free and in our List of 158 More Good Books You Can Read for Free.
Borrow for free. Sex Tips for Girls, although fairly relentlessly humorous, really is full of good tips when it comes to sex and relationships.
I’m yawning, writing this article. (Has anyone put together a montage of yawns to show to insomniacs?) These books about sleep (and many more) are available to borrow for free from the Internet Archive.
The performance had the scope and scale of a natural disaster. The Romanze opens with an entirely doable B flat, but I landed on an altogether different note, and flailed and thrashed through the rest of the opening phrase like a drowning three-year-old. After four bars my intimidating accompanist decided that there was no real point in hoping for some kind of overlap between the key I was playing in and the key he was playing in. He pulled his fingers away from the keyboard and, looking inquiringly over his shoulder, sounded a discreet B flat.
One morning in August 1955, Eppie found herself reading and rereading the lovelorn column, called “Your Problems,” in the Chicago Sun-Times. And she suddenly realized exactly what she wanted to do: she would assist the lovelorn columnist! Eppie immediately phoned Wilbur Munnecke, a Sun-Times executive whom she had befriended years before. Might the columnist Ann Landers need help answering her mail? “Funny you should ask,” Munnecke responded. “It is odd that you are calling me now. Ruth Crowley, our Ann Landers, died suddenly last week.” The newspaper was, in fact, seeking a replacement for Crowley. When Eppie suggested that she could be the new Ann Landers, Munnecke laughed out loud. Crowley had been a journalist and a nurse. Her column was syndicated in more than two dozen newspapers. Eppie Lederer was a housewife without a college degree, and more than 25 other women, many of whom were experienced journalists, had applied for the position.
It’s awful to write to you because, even though I love writing to you, it brings you so near me I could almost touch you and I know at the same time that I cannot touch you, you are so far away in cold, unkind Ringwood and I am in stale Barnet in a roadhouse pub with nothing but your absence and your distance, to keep my heart company.
Madame Godin [Isabel Godin des Odonais] was the wife of one of the French mathematicians who were sent to Peru, in South America, about the middle of the last century [1769], for the purpose of making some observations there, which should improve our knowledge of geography. She set out from Rio-bamba, the place of her residence, with the design of joining her husband at Cayenne, a distance of thirteen or fourteen hundred leagues.
An interesting example of a mathematical pattern found in the real world is the arrangement of petals and florets (the small rudimentary flowers that are found, easily visible, in the center of some flowers such as sunflowers). In some species these florets are distributed in groups of spirals that curl in different directions and intercept each other. Often the number of elements that curl in one direction is 34, while the number of elements curling in the opposite direction is 55….
You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons. Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools….
“Bad language” was a relatively accepted aspect of English even in Shakespeare’s day — not that he actually used the most forbidden words, but he clearly alluded to them (“Do you think I meant country matters?”), and he revelled in vigorous insults. In King Lear, when Oswald asks the Earl of Kent, “What dost thou know me for?” the latter replies, “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition.” He follows that up with “Draw, you whoreson cullionly barbermonger! Draw!”…
“‘When on board the ship,’ said Edison, as we sat down to déjeuner on the terrace of the Eiffel Tower, première étage, ‘they put rolls and coffee on the table for breakfast. I thought that that was a very poor breakfast for a man to do any work upon. But I suppose one gets used to it. I would like one American meal for a change — plenty of pie for a change.’ He then smashed the roll with his fist.”
True or false, the public airing of this dirty washing might have harmed Onassis’s reputation irretrievably had the whole affair not suddenly taken a fantastic twist….
“Left Padua at twelve, and arrived at Lord Byron’s country house, La Mira, near Lusina, at two. He was but just up and in his bath; soon came down to me; first time we have met these five years; grown fat, which spoils the picturesqueness of his head….”
About eight o’clock I strolled in very jauntily. In my mind I had the whole programme mapped out. I would stay at the hospital for, say, two days following the operation — or, at most, three. Then I must be up and away. I had a good deal of work to do and a number of people to see on important business, and I could not really afford to waste more than a weekend on the staff of St Germicide’s. After Monday they must look to their own devices for social entertainment. That was my idea….
As the means to his end Poniatowski seemed specially suited. Williams had heard enough of Catherine to infer that she was not averse to an intrigue, and great though her devotion might be to the banished Soltykof — was it not the gossip of the ante-chambers that she had once waited for him till three in the morning at a rendezvous to which he never came? — the wily diplomatist was too much of a cynic to believe in the deathlessness of any passion. Broken hearts could always be mended, and who was more likely to patch together deftly the shattered fragments of the Grand Duchess’s than his charming young Pole?…
The “Fejee Mermaid” was by many supposed to be a curiosity manufactured by myself or made to my order. This is not the fact. I certainly had much to do in bringing it before the public, and as I am now in the confessional mood, I will “make a clean breast” of the ways and means I adopted for that purpose. I must first, however, relate how it came into my possession and its alleged history.
Borrow for free. There’s nothing like reading funny stories of travel mishaps to make you feel happy and snug in your armchair.
The books in this gallery of notable books you can borrow for free are in addition to the individual books featured in our Books to Read Free posts and on our List of 158 More Good Books You Can Read Free and our List of 63 More Great Books You Can Read For Free. It is super-easy for anyone to borrow from the Internet Archive.
A list, in no particular order, of 158 notable books you can borrow free from the Internet Archive. Fiction titles are in brown. The books on this list are in addition to the individual books featured in our Books to Read Free posts and in our Gallery of 19 More Notable Books You Can Read for Free and in our List of 63 More Great Books You Can Read for Free.
I shall never forget the first time I ever saw a pickpocket at work. It was when I was about thirteen years old. A boy of my own age, Zack, a great pal of mine, was with me. Zack and I understood one another thoroughly and well knew how to get theatre money by petty pilfering, but of real graft we were as yet ignorant, although we had heard many stories about the operations of actual, professional thieves. We used to steal rides in the cars which ran to and from the Grand Street ferries — and run off with overcoats and satchels when we had a chance. One day we were standing on the rear platform when a woman boarded the car, and immediately behind her a gentlemanly looking man with a high hat….
By this time [1906] the new factory was built and new machinery had been put inside it, and one day in January, a little before my thirteenth birthday, we went to see it. Mario took us round, and as I was standing with a mass of loose curling hair almost to my knees, the wind of a steel shaft caught it. I was snatched up, revolving, with my head ground against the shaft and my feet floating horizontal. I know that it seemed a very long time: at each revolution my feet struck a wall or pillar and I wondered if my shoes were coming off….
Okay. I’ll admit hitting the bear on the ass with a rock was a bad move. But there’s no way I was going to let him steal my last loaf of bread. In retrospect, returning to the campground on Barclay Bay was just a poor decision. A few weeks prior I had stopped to camp there while paddling down the Missinaibi River and was confronted by the same darn bear….
Sure it was a million years ago, but the Beatles are still interesting. Some of the Beatles resources in the Internet Archive are outside the mainstream and pretty worthwhile.
When I was in high school, in Lancaster, I formed my first band, the Black-Outs. The name derives from when a few of the guys, after drinking peppermint schnapps, purchased illicitly by somebody’s older brother, blacked out. This was the only R&B band in the entire Mojave Desert at that time. Three of the guys (Johnny Franklin, Carter Franklin and Wayne Lyles) were black, the Salazar brothers were Mexican and Terry Wimberly represented the other oppressed peoples of the earth.
Humphry Davy earned his seat in the scientific pantheon by a remarkable succession of discoveries, extending from sodium and potassium to the miners’ safety lamp and Michael Faraday, whom he engaged as keeper of the laboratory records and inducted into the mysteries of scientific research. Davy got his start in natural philosophy, as science was then called, in 1798, when at the age of 19 he was appointed assistant in Dr Thomas Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. Beddoes, chemist, physician, and polymath, was something of a public figure, thanks to his well-advertised demonstrations of ‘factitious airs’ — the recently discovered gases, of which nitrous oxide, laughing gas, excited the greatest interest….
The tree men came and chopped up his home. They took half the tree away — half his home. They weren’t good tree men. They didn’t even have a chain saw to do the job right. They used machetes. When they were through there were raw wounds and splintered stubs of branches everywhere on the tree.
Stieglitz brought Georgia to the bright little studio apartment of his niece, Elizabeth, who was living elsewhere. When Georgia had arrived in New York, she was tired and ill. Stieglitz ordered her to stay in bed, and had his brother, a well-known doctor, examine her. Stieglitz himself visited every day, and even learned how to boil eggs for her. He returned to his apartment after his wife was asleep. Within a week he was writing to Arthur Dove of Georgia’s “uncommon beauty, spontaneity, clearness of mind and feeling, and the marvelous intensity with which she lived every moment.”
Folk legends surround the life of Old West Outlaw Jesse James. Once, it has been told, while Jesse and his brother Frank were riding in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains with the Younger brothers, they stopped at a small, out—of—the—way cabin to ask for food. The sole occupant of the house was a poor, saddened woman whose husband had recently passed away. Overcoming any apprehension, the woman kindly agreed to throw some scraps together and feed the strangers. Once inside, however, Jesse sensed that something terrible was troubling the widow….
My English teacher is my only advocate. She’s also the daughter of Mrs. G and Doc G, so she pleads with her parents that I’m smarter than my grades and my behavior indicate. She even arranges an IQ test and the results confirm her opinion. Andre, she says, you need to apply yourself. Prove to Mrs. G that you’re not who she thinks you are. I tell her that I am applying myself, that I’m doing as well as I can under the circumstances….
Borrow for free. Highlights of sex in Elizabeth I’s England: shenanigans in the royal household, courtesans, the selling of virginity, the horror of being a cuckold, serial seducers, homosexuality, pornography, licentious poetry, plays, and literature, cross-dressing, impotence, fashion, and syphilis.
It was here [Budapest] that I suffered the complete breakdown of the nerves to which I have referred. What I experienced during the period of that illness surpasses all belief. My sight and hearing were always extraordinary. I could clearly discern objects in the distance when others saw no trace of them. Several times in my boyhood I saved the houses of our neighbors from fire by hearing the faint crackling sounds which did not disturb their sleep, and calling for help. In 1899, when I was past forty and carrying on my experiments in Colorado, I could hear very distinctly thunderclaps at a distance of 550 miles. The limit of audition for my young assistants was scarcely more than 150 miles. My ear was thus over thirteen times more sensitive. Yet at that time I was, so to speak, stone deaf in comparison with the acuteness of my hearing while under the nervous strain….
Borrow for free. “Tasty” describes this colorful vegetarian cookbook with appealing recipes and beautiful photos from Mary McCartney, Paul and Linda’s daughter.
I found him sharing a cage with a reddish female counterpart in the boarding area of my vet’s hospital facility, where they had been sitting for five months, waiting patiently for someone who was never coming back. There they were: two seventy-five-pound dogs, a golden retriever and a flat-coated retriever, sharing a dog bed on the floor of a cell that was just slightly larger than the two of them. They seemed bored but otherwise in good health and sensibly cautious when I opened the cage. A few minutes after that, they both became very friendly….
It was just past noon on Friday, June 24, [1932] when Jimmie Coslove peeped through the hole in the gate, glimpsed a pair of men he didn’t know, closed the peep, walked into the club, and said to Jack, “I have a hunch we’re about to be raided.” Jimmie’s instinct was enough for Jack. Clinking two glasses together, he got the attention of the patrons in the barroom and said quietly, “Ladies and gentlemen, please finish your drinks and keep calm, we might have a few visitors.” He cracked a smile and added, “In other words, it’s a raid, so bottoms up.”
I once dated a cute guy in high school who served me spaghetti by candlelight and taught me to play Frisbee. He was a great kisser. He was good at French and geometry. But I had to break up with him because he liked the rock band Journey. Plus, he wore a puka shell necklace. In college, I dated a gorgeous Rhodes scholar who spent his summers distributing sacks of grain to starving children in Africa. He took me to wine tastings and the opera. But I had to break up with him because his name was Yehuda. Imagine having sex with someone and screaming, “Oh, do me, Yehuda.” Just not possible. After college, I had to break up with a civil rights lawyer because he had a mullet….
The only recurrence of the temperamental joyance that was a large part of his nature was when he related the Spray’s experiences. For no sadness of soul could ever rob Jack London of his native delight in a boat. In relation to this very trip, I am tempted to quote from “Small-Boat Sailing” (in The Human Drift): “After all,” he says, “the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing….”
My second term at Normandale, at Bexhill-on-Sea, proved to be my last there. I had been sent there as a boarder, at the age of six, shortly after my mother had married David Stiven; and I was blissfully happy, being by far the youngest boy in the school and, consequently, much fussed over. But when the summer term ended I found myself spending a dreary, lonely August holiday confined to a rather gloomy London hotel in the Cromwell Road….
Borrow for free. As a child, acclaimed biographer Peter Ackroyd actually knew the young F. Scott Fitzgerald, who rented a house on Ackroyd’s family estate.
In the Long Ago, when people lighted the dark winter nights with tallow candles, a candle shop stood by the side of a brook. There was a great set kettle for trying out, a heavy iron press and leaden moulds. Altogether, it was a pretty greasy place, with piles of fresh tallow leaves, great “cheeses” of scraps, barrels of prepared tallow, and boxes of candles ready for market, and the fall and winter birds evidently thought it a feast provided by the gods for their delectation.
The presiding genius of the shop — David, the Candlemaker — was an uncouth man, but he had a big heart and a warm love for the sweet things of nature, especially birds, and they seemed to know it. How they took possession and over-ran the place!…
A stocky man climbs on board with his stocky wife; they are healthy and solid and sunburned. He asks why I’m taking pictures of the stations. The graffiti, I tell him. He’s Albanian, he says. He’s been in Italy fifteen years. Drives a lorry, in Taranto. There is no work now with the economic crisis. In particular there is no work for an Albanian. After fifteen years here he’s still not treated as an equal. It doesn’t bother him now. He came illegally on a rubber dinghy but managed to get his papers in the end. It’s harder these days. He was lucky. His wife nods and smiles at everything he says….
Here is how my father died; one night, the police find him pulled over in his car on the side of the highway. He’s unconscious with a head injury, the apparent victim of an assault. They think it occurred in the parking lot at Rutgers University, where he is taking night classes to get his master’s degree. He is thirty-nine years old.He is brought to the hospital, where doctors perform emergency brain surgery. My brother, Eric, and I aren’t told until the following day, after he is out of immediate danger. I don’t remember who took us to visit him a couple of days later: Mom or his second wife, Beth. My parents have been divorced for seven years, and their relationship is terrible. So it was probably Beth.
I made my first public appearance on the Stairs up to the school nurse’s room, at St Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on 13 September 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying, ‘Cheeeese! Chee-eese!’…
Born in 1688, Emanuel Swedenborg began his career by mastering all the sciences of his day. Still judged by many to have possessed more factual information than any other person in history, he wrote 150 scientific works in chemistry, physics, mineralogy, geology, paleontology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, optics and so forth. These contained many original discoveries: he described the function of the ductless glands and the cerebellum; he originated the nebular hypothesis of the solar system; he suggested the particle structure of magnets….
Dear Godwin, —
The punch, after the wine, made me tipsy last night. This I mention, not that my head aches, or that I felt, after I quitted you, any unpleasantness or titubancy; but because tipsiness has, and has always, one unpleasant effect — that of making me talk very extravagantly; and as, when sober, I talk extravagantly enough for any common tipsiness, it becomes a matter of nicety in discrimination to know when I am or am not affected….
We soon came to the house we were looking for, by far the most impressive structure in the whole village. From the outside it looked decidedly gloomy with its blackened walls, narrow barred windows, and all the marks of long neglect. It had been the home of a titled family which had gone away long ago; then it had served as a barracks for the carabinieri until they had moved to their newly-built modern headquarters, and the filth and squalor of the walls inside still bore witness to its military occupation.
Borrow for free. From Gregorian chants to John Cage, this funny ebook about music history shares mindblowing, rarely seen information about the lives of musicians who helped shape music.
Harry Parr-Davies was an accompanist for Gracie Fields and writer of some of her most famous songs, among them the World War II classic ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’. Alas, on a 1939 Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary with Fields, Parr-Davies appeared to run clean out of luck, possibly while waving someone goodbye, when his glasses fell overboard. He was too short-sighted to read music without them, and in some embarrassment went to report his mishap to Fields.
The Chaplin boys were reunited with their mother [Hannah] in the early spring of 1896, but their address is not certain. They moved from cheap rented room to rented room, and in the space of three months they found themselves in six different garrets or basements. Chaplin’s memories of this London period are generally unhappy. Sydney had outgrown his only coat, and so Hannah made him one out of an old velvet jacket she owned; Sydney was also forced to wear a pair of his mother’s high-heeled shoes cut down to size.
Back on the train I was upgraded to second class. Ricky called to let me know he’d arranged some company for me. He said I was going to meet Magnet Man. (As his name suggests, he is a man who is magnetic.) I enjoy weird stuff like this, it’s what makes the world interesting. I made my way to his carriage. Mikhail was a dead ringer for Bez out of the Happy Mondays. He was bare-chested and he didn’t speak English, so there was no small talk. He went straight into sticking cutlery to his chest. It’s a strange one, ‘cos as much as it is a type of superpower it’s not one that you think might be a useful one.
…And the stories about my father grew steadily worse. Some were altogether incredible, yet were continually being repeated. One of them was so bad I was nearly distracted about it. Mr. and Mrs. John Connett, true friends of my father in Pittsfield, came round to his office one day and repeated it to him sympathetically and with the assurance that they and their friends were going to do the best they could to “nail that lie.” With such a story circulating — i.e., that Father was going demented and, under the delusion that insects were crawling around in everybody’s wounds or inwards, was poisoning and killing his patients wholesale in the endeavor to poison and kill out the cockroaches, tumble-bugs, etc., was it any wonder that my father’s practice suffered?
Sarah’s malady was still a mystery, yet that October she was discharged from the asylum and listed as “Recovered.” Clara rented a furnished room for them, and when Johnny Bennett visited her there, she told him that her mother had been on location with her in New Bedford. No mention of an asylum was made.
The following set [of pirate articles] appears to have survived intact and is reprinted from the 1726 edition of Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. These articles were drawn up by Captain John Phillips and his crew of pirates at the beginning of their 1723 voyage in the schooner Revenge…. Their ship was taken by surprise and they didn’t have a chance to destroy their articles.
In an American paper I find this anecdote: “An old lady was being shown the spot on which a hero fell. ‘I don’t wonder,’ she replied. ‘It’s so slippery I nearly fell there myself.'”
Now that story, which is very old in England, and is familiar here to most adult persons, is usually told of Nelson and the Victory. Indeed it is such a commonplace with facetious visitors to that vessel that the wiser of the guides are at pains to get in with it first. But in America it may be fresh and beginning a new lease of life; it will probably go on forever in all English-speaking countries, on each occasion of its recrudescence finding a few people to whom it is new….
…In early 1999 I made a drawing using a camera lucida. It was an experiment, based on a hunch that Ingres, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, may have occasionally used this little optical device, then newly invented. My curiosity had been aroused when went to an exhibition of his portraits at London’s National Gallery and was struck by how I small the drawings were, yet so uncannily ‘accurate’. I know how difficult it is to achieve such precision, and wondered how he had done it. What followed led to this book.
She had no sooner disembarked at Aspinwall [Panama] [in 1864] than she set out to find the cemetery where she imagined George Marshall was buried. Without worrying about her trunks, which had been piled on top of each other at random, without haggling over a high-priced room, Fanny set off down the main street, threading her way, her daughter in tow, between the slums and brothels, the billiard parlors and gambling dens. Then she crossed the iron track along the seafront and the sheds where rows of bananas, coconuts, heaps of coral, and vegetable ivory awaited shipment to New York, baking under roofs of corrugated metal.
I worked for my brother from August 1899, to March, 1901, at $16 a month, making $304, of which I spent only $12 in that time, as I had clothes. On the first day of March I went to a farm that I had bought for $150, paying $50 down. It was a bush farm, ten miles from my brother’s place and seven miles from the nearest crossroads store. A man had owned it and cleared two acres, and then fallen sick and the storekeeper got it for a debt and sold it to me. My brother heard of it and advised me to buy it….
“I remember I started one of these poems in Marvell’s four-foot couplet and showed it to my wife. And she said “Why not say what really happened?” (It wasn’t the one about her.) The metre just seemed to prevent any honesty on the subject, it got into the cadence of the four-foot couplet.”
Borrow for free. An investigation of the history and ideas of a multitude of experiences that are denied by conventional reality.
“In 1998, I interviewed Dave Pirner of the band Soul Asylum. Relative to most alt rockers, he was a pretty good talker; we discussed his liberal political views and the state of the music industry and — very briefly — his defunct relationship with Winona Ryder. All in all, we were on the phone for maybe thirty-five minutes.”
“I had never published the following Account of my Life, had it not been at the Desire of several of my particular Friends. As they had heard (a considerable Time after I enter’d Trumpeter on board the Revenge Privateer) that I was kill’d, with several others, by the Spaniards, in attacking a Bark near the Canary Islands, my returning safe to England surpriz’d them very much, and made them curious to enquire into the Manner of my Deliverance.”
“When that letter came in London I was most awfully sorry and wished I had never seen the boy. I was perfectly miserable and from trying to imagine how he felt I almost felt I was a criminal.”
It was not until I was seven that I became embarrassed by my father’s lack of self-consciousness. He had just discovered the Bates ‘better sight without glasses’ book and method. One exercise involved rolling the eyeballs in order to strengthen the internal muscles of the eye. Another, called ‘palming’, required one to place one’s palms over both eyes and to imagine a starless night or black velvet. When my father chose to do these exercises, sitting beside me on a District Line train en route to Dorking via Wimbledon, I sat in silence, cheeks burning, convinced that our fellow passengers would think him crazy.
“Fields’ family made little more than a token search. His mother felt that, at eleven, he was young to set up on his own, but the problems of four other children diverted her mind. The attitude of Fields’ father could perhaps be summed up by the handy phrase ‘good riddance.'”
Borrow for free. A fascinating look at the life of an extraordinarily gifted Frenchwoman who earned her living painting portraits of the aristocracy, fleeing the French Revolution to work her way through the courts of Italy, Austria, Russia, and England.
“The dreadful year of 1789 was upon us, and fear had already seized the minds of wise men and women. I remember the events of one evening in particular; I had invited some people to a concert in my house. Most of those who arrived were quite distraught; they had been to Longchamps that morning and the populace, gathered at the barrier of L’Etoile, had hurled abuse at all those who passed by in carriages; the wretched folk jumped onto the tailboards crying ‘Next year you will be travelling behind and we will be inside!’ as well as a thousand other insults of an even more vicious nature.”
Henry [Hill]: I’m walking along the street near the pizzeria when Paul pulls up and Karen comes charging out the car door. It was like a hit. She’s really steamed. She comes running right up to me and yelling that nobody stands her up. “Nobody does that to me!” she’s screaming on the street. I mean, she’s loud. I put up my hands to calm her down. I told her that I didn’t show because I was sure she was going to stand me up. I said I’d make it up to her.
“No sooner had I sat down to write to the Count, but a page from the Prince came to me, saying, that the Prince desired to speak with me: at this message my blood ran chill in every vein, as if I had been informed of some sudden accident….”
“When Molière fled from Paris, he became, in the phrase of the theatre, a “barn-stormer.” An ox- cart was his home, his play-house some vacant grange or tennis-court. Eventually he obtained a following in certain towns, and recognition as an official entertainer in at least two provinces ; yet for nearly thirteen years he was at best a vagabond, tramping the highroads of France beside his unwinged chariot.”
Creative Dreaming, by clinical psychologist Patricia Garfield, is a really useful, classic guide to creating a dream world that serves and is in harmony with your waking life. You can borrow it from the Internet Archive for up to 14 days.
Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs, as I feel right here; of being foursquare with the life we have chosen. All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do. In the advertisements of the county paper I find men angling for money by promising to make women beautiful and men learned or rich — overnight — by inspiring good farmers and carpenters to be poor doctors and lawyers. It is curious, is it not, with what skill we will adapt our sandy land to potatoes and grow our beans in clay, and with how little wisdom we farm the soils of our own natures. We try to grow poetry where plumbing would thrive grandly! — not knowing that plumbing is as important and honourable and necessary to this earth as poetry….
“One interesting aspect of the music of Philip Glass is that despite its supposed ‘avant-garde’ modernity, it utilizes elements that have been around for over a thousand years. Almost all of Glass’s compositions employ a ground bass, a series of unchanging bass notes upon which are stacked a variety of short melodies and scales. The ground bass evolved out of the ‘cantus firmus’ used in Gregorian Chant and was characteristic in Baroque music.”
California truck driver Larry Walters had always wanted to be an airplane pilot, but poor eyesight prevented him from fulfilling his ambition. Undeterred, he decided to build his own flying contraption, which resulted in a crazy adventure in the skies above Los Angeles in the summer of 1982.
“In August 1874, backed by not only the New York Herald but also Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Stanley sailed once again for Zanzibar. With 347 porters, guides and dependants, laden with rifles, the expedition that marched for the Lualaba on 17 November was even bigger and more extravagant than the one he had raised to rescue Livingstone….”
One night, after a meal at the house with my wife Helen and Terry Gilliam, who happened to have dropped by, I found I’d run out of cigarettes (at the time I had a twenty-a-day habit). I looked for a half-crown piece for the slot machine up the road, but could find nothing. I rifled through drawers, flung open cupboards and slid my hand down the back of sofas with increasing desperation. ‘You’re an addict,’ warned Terry. I smiled wanly. ‘I’m not an addict, I would quite like one last cigarette before bed, that’s all….’
“Honestly, I don’t recall the sequence of events that led to $110,000 being in the pot. But I remember that most of the money in the pot previously belonged to Tkachuk and me.”
Borrow for free. Ranging from “Make a Bomb in a Bag” to “Kiss Hello Like the French”, from “Cook Something in the Dishwasher” to “Construct Your Own Flying Machine”, there is truly something here to strike fear into any parent’s heart.
☀ You can borrow and read Off the Map free below. ☀ “Narrative historian” Fergus Fleming makes these adventure tales come alive. Reaching from the 13th century when Marco Polo traveled into the heart of the Mongol Empire, to 1928 when Umberto Nobile flew his airship (blimp) over the North Pole, Off the…
Read More “Off the Map: Tales of Endurance and Exploration • by Fergus Fleming” »
I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage. (I didn’t ask myself such questions at the time.) In retrospect, I guess that like many others, I decided that making my art in public (even if that meant playing people’s songs at that point) was a way of reaching out and communicating when ordinary chitchat was not comfortable for me. It seemed not only a way to “speak” in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation — other musicians and even girls (!) would talk to someone who had just been on stage.
“My suitcase weighed forty kilograms, and the moment I tried to carry it out of Dum Dum Airport the truth of the matter tapped upon my spine. There was no way I was going to haul this behemoth through the streets of India. The only solution was to extract the absolute essentials, put the thing in storage and reclaim it on my departure from Calcutta. My first thought was that I’d have to find a tourist hotel, and leave the bag in a storage room or behind a desk. But as I glanced around the baggage claim area, I spied a squarish, hand-lettered sign above an open door: LEFT LUGGAGE.”
“I’ve got a three-year-old son who thinks I go into space every day, and he loves the whole idea. He’s one of the few children who learned to count from ten down to one before he learned to count it the other way. So he thinks it’s wonderful and he thinks it’s mundane. He thinks it’s all possible — lots of people go up into space. He hasn’t quite realized that it’s still a fairly new occupation.”
“When I was sixteen, I saw a girl of angelic beauty seated in the window of a house on the block where I lived. Though I had never before seen an angel, she was exactly how I imagined an angel should look. She lived so near, yet somehow I had never met her, nor even seen her. Perhaps it’s because my eyes weren’t ready to see her until that moment. I knew I had to meet her, but I wasn’t certain how to do it.”
Borrow for free. “There is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it — from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons — are [like Princess Leia’s hologram] only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time. The main architects of this astonishing idea are two of the world’s most eminent thinkers: University of London physicist David Bohm, a protege of Einstein’s and one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists; and Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University.”
“Our love comes from friendship, our sex is sex. Plain old sex. Our sex doesn’t involve love and that’s how we like it.”