My mother and stepdad are downsizing and moving, and that’s led me to inherit some lovely family heirlooms in recent weeks. One of my favorites is a beautiful chocolate pot and matching cups and saucers. There’s no markings on it so we can’t tell who made it, but it was a wedding gift to one […]
Category: Health
Book Inventory Row 4: Caring for Your Hair and Eyes (and other parts)
This entry in the “what’s on my bookshelf” includes more health and fitness books, including some related to caring for your hair and eyes, a few Red Cross guidebooks, and a Christian fitness book. And for some reason the Sears Discovery Charm school binder sits on this shelf. I think it belongs elsewhere, but I […]
Book Inventory Row Three: This Time, Horizontal!
A skinny third row down on my first bookcase demands that I stack them horizontally. The books this week are mostly health and some sex-related titles, including a book on stammering, one printed in Norwegian (from our last-summer adventures to BookTown), and a possibly self-published book from 1947, printed in Baltimore and signed by the […]
Book Inventory: Shelf 1, Row 2, in which I discover I file badly
I’m only on shelf one, row two, and I realize that I have sex books for kids mixed in with physical education textbooks, and other health books. Woops. I guess I should reorganize as I go, but eh, that’s not within scope of the project. 🙂 I also (re)discovered that I have a book from 1782 in […]
2015 Inventory of Collections: Shelf 1, Row 1: Health
Over the years I’ve done a so-so job of tracking which books are in my collection, from a long-ago database on my old Mac, to my website bibliography, and an ultimate move to Librarything.com which has been great and so much easier, but I’ve never managed to get all of my titles loaded. So for […]
Antique Vibrator Collection
Miss Abigail has a little thing, I guess you could say, about antique vibrators. Don’t get any wild ideas ~ it’s nothing dirty (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) ~ I just love the packaging on those old boxes, trying so carefully to talk about the health benefits of use and the calming effect their […]
Prostration by Heat (1931)
Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog as of late. I’ve been posting over on Facebook and Twitter (the lazy blogger’s way of staying connected). The big news since I last updated here is that the Off-Broadway show that was loosely based on my book, has closed as of the end of June. […]
The Care and Feeding of Children: Airing (1907)
My fabulous friends Laura and Dave are, in the next few weeks, about to have their lives changed by the arrival of a bouncing baby boy. Upon realizing that I had an extra copy of a book called The Care and Feeding of Children, I passed along the 1920s version (I kept the 1907 copy […]
Personal Hygiene for Young Women and Men (1920s)
For my day job, I work at the Library of Congress helping archive the Internet, and I don’t often get to see the physical stuff in our collections. So when a colleague tipped me off to some amazing films from the 1920s that had apparently been in our nitrate vault and scored by another colleague, […]
How to Cure Chapped Lips (1916)
Wondering how to cure chapped lips? Instructions from a 1916 book by Professor T. W. Shannon: ~~ Take 2 ounces of white wax, I ounce of spermaceti, 4 ounces of oil of almonds, 2 ounces of honey, 1/4 of an ounce of essence of bergamot, or any other scent. Melt the wax and spermaceti; then […]