Oddments
From cut-out confessions to cheese pages: browse the world's strangest books: Edward Brooke-Hitching set out to curate the ultimate collection of bizarre books down the ages. He leads us around the Madman’s Library
Speaking as someone who has worked in at least one of the collections which holds one of the items cited, several of those books are pretty much instances of genres, e.g. grimoires, or 'book bound in human skin' (I have a vague niggling memory that at least one alleged example known to me was subjected to searching examination and deemed, actually pigskin. One does see that there might have been, alas, a market for books allegedly bound in human skin.) So perhaps not quite so out there?
Maybe it's in the book, and not in the examples given in that article: The Harry Ransom Center Blood Book: (Evelyn Waugh was weird) (no actual blood, simulated with red ink): [O]ne of the most curious objects in Waugh’s entire library, a large oblong folio decoupage book often referred to as the "Victorian Blood Book." Created by Victorian businessman John Bingley Garland, the craftsmanship is exquisite. Its decoupage was assembled from several hundred engravings, many taken from books of etchings by William Blake, as well as other illustrations from early nineteenth-century books.
What Awaits Muses Who Outlive Their Usefulness? I think another way of framing this is posited in the actual subtitle: 'Annalena McAfee on the Women Who Got Away', no?
This is an interesting piece on the Macaroni but I think I would like rather more robust evidence of a connection between eating macaroni (as opposed to poncey furrin vittles generally - and I'm not sure how soundly that is sustained either) and the Unspeakable Vice of Sodom in the C18th.
I daresay everyone's seen this already by now: Gender reveal goes wrong as powder cannon flare flies into dad’s crotch. In the realm of horrible wrongnesses resulting from gender reveals, that one seems extremely minor.
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