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Category: Literature

By The Generalist Posted on August 2, 2022August 13, 2022

The book arcade

Around the end of the 19th century, Melbourne, Australia, hosted one of the biggest – and certainly the most carnivalesque – bookstores in the world: Cole’s Book Arcade.

Categories: 19th century history, 20th century history, Economics & business, Literature, Oceania
By The Generalist Posted on July 30, 2022January 25, 2023

Wordless novels and motionless movies

Novels have words and films move. But some creators have resisted even these conventions, creating novels without writing and films without motion.

Categories: 20th century history, Art, Europe, Film & television, Literature, North & Central America
By The Generalist Posted on June 13, 2022June 13, 2022

Fantasy revised

In the original edition of The Hobbit, Gollum was willing to give up the ring; before 1994 the American and British editions of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader were different; Madame Mim was removed from The Sword and the Stone for its 1958 reissue.

Categories: 20th century history, Europe, Literature
By The Generalist Posted on March 20, 2022January 25, 2023

German troublemakers

In the 1865 German children’s book Max and Moritz, the titular troublemakers blow up a teacher, are baked in an oven, and finally get ground up in a flour mill and eaten by ducks.

Categories: 19th century history, Europe, Literature
By The Generalist Posted on February 17, 2022February 16, 2022

Medieval cat poetry

Pangur Bán was an Irish monk’s cat in 9th century Germany; we know this cat’s name because the monk wrote a poem about him. Even though this poem was written more than a thousand years ago, Pangur Bán was not the first named cat in history.

Categories: Ancient history, Animals, Europe, Literature, Medieval history, Middle East
By The Generalist Posted on February 8, 2022January 25, 2023

Cryptographic magic

Steganographia is a late 15th / early 16th century German book of magic… but it’s not actually about magic.

Categories: Early modern history, Europe, Language, Literature, Mathematics & statistics, Religion & belief
By The Generalist Posted on February 4, 2022February 3, 2022

Mythical Indian Ocean continent

Before we knew about plate tectonics, a zoologist proposed a lost continent connecting Madagascar and India across the Indian Ocean. That hypothesis, now debunked, was nevertheless picked up by Theosophists and Tamil revivalists.

Categories: 19th century history, Africa, Ancient history, Earth science, Literature, Religion & belief, South Asia
By The Generalist Posted on February 2, 2022January 25, 2023

The history of The History of King Lear

From 1681 to 1838, performances of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy King Lear had a happy ending.

Categories: 19th century history, Early modern history, Europe, Literature, Theatre
By The Generalist Posted on January 28, 2022January 27, 2022

Original cliffhanger

Cliffhangers have been a staple of serialised fiction for centuries, but the first literal cliffhanger appears in an 1873 novel by Thomas Hardy.

Categories: 19th century history, 20th century history, Europe, Film & television, Literature
By The Generalist Posted on January 20, 2022January 25, 2023

An Anglo-Saxon in Middle Earth

In an early version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s stories, the tales of Middle Earth are brought to our world by Ottor Wǽfre, who would go on to be the father of both the author of Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.

Categories: Europe, Literature
By The Generalist Posted on January 5, 2022January 25, 2023

Don’t forget to breathe

People with central hypoventilation syndrome, also known as Ondine’s curse, can forget to breathe.

Categories: 19th century history, 20th century history, Europe, Health & medicine, Literature, Theatre
By The Generalist Posted on December 21, 2021December 20, 2021

Redacted art book

From 1966 until 2016, English artist Tom Phillips created a new story out of the Victorian novel A Human Document; he did not add any words, but selectively drew or painted over each of its pages to surface something entirely new.

Categories: 20th century history, 21st century history, Art, Europe, Literature
By The Generalist Posted on December 8, 2021December 8, 2021

Deciphering a secret society manual

Around 1730 a German secret society recorded their initiation rituals in an encrypted manuscript. In 2011, that cipher was finally decoded.

Categories: 21st century history, Early modern history, Europe, Language, Literature, Religion & belief
By The Generalist Posted on November 26, 2021November 25, 2021

Indigenous appropriation

Iron Eyes Cody portrayed Native American characters in more than 200 films and the famous “Crying Indian” TV ad. Red Thunder Cloud and Jamake Highwater presented themselves as experts on Native American culture. None of them were actually indigenous.

Categories: 20th century history, Film & television, Literature, North & Central America
By The Generalist Posted on November 11, 2021November 10, 2021

The author of Aladdin

Neither Aladdin nor Ali Baba were in the original Thousand and One Nights (aka the Arabian Nights). The tales first appeared in the French translation, probably from a Syrian Christian storyteller named Hanna Diyab who lived in Paris from 1708 to 1710.

Categories: Early modern history, Europe, Literature, Middle East
By The Generalist Posted on August 24, 2021August 22, 2021

November 22, 1963

John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis all died the same day. The following day, Doctor Who premiered.

Categories: 20th century history, Europe, Film & television, Literature, North & Central America

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