The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea.
Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.
For decades, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. kept a record of the books he read. Pleasingly, the last entry is Thornton Wilder’s 1935 novel Heaven’s My Destination.
In Winter Rules, George Gardner Herrick claims that the book was not to be found in Holmes’ library in Washington or Massachusetts. I can’t confirm that, though.
Sort of related: The definition of confection in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language contains this quotation:
Of best things then, what world shall yield confection
To liken her?
Shakespeare.
In 1893 a correspondent to Notes and Queries pointed out that this passage appears nowhere in Shakespeare. “I have just now found it in [Sir Philip Sidney’s] ‘Arcadia,’ book i, the eclogue of Thyrsis and Dorus. Clearly he quoted from memory. What a memory the man had! — and how careless he sometimes was in trusting it.”
One of the most moving epitaphs I ever read — actually it is an inscription — is in Ixelles cemetery, Brussels, on the tomb of a girl who had been the mistress of Gen. Georges Boulanger, a former War Minister of France. She died in July 1891; that September, heartbroken, Boulanger made the supreme romantic gesture, one that many, many bereft lovers have threatened, but very, very few have carried through: He shot himself at her tomb. He is buried beside her, and his last, impassioned cry rings out in bronze:
AI-JE BIEN PU VIVRE
2 MOIS 1/2 SANS TOI!(‘How did I live two and a half months without you!’) Romeo said nothing more poignant.
— J. Bryan, Hodgepodge: A Commonplace Book, 1986
In their 1943 handbook The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge note that writers are prone to exaggerate descriptions of quantity and duration. “There should never be any doubt left as to how much, or how long.” They offer this quantified example:
(100%) Mr. Jordan’s fortune consisted wholly of bar-gold.
(99%) Practically all his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(95%) His fortune consisted almost entirely of bar-gold.
(90%) Nearly all his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(80%) By far the greater part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(70%) The greater part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(60%) More than half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(55%) Rather more than half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(50%) Half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(45%) Nearly half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(40%) A large part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(35%) Quite a large part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(30%) A considerable part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(25%) Part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(15%) A small part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(10%) Not much of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(5%) A very small part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(1%) An inconsiderable part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(0%) None of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
“This simple, generally accepted, scale is confused by writers who, for dramatic effect, try to make 5% seem more than it is.”
When old Green, the frame-maker, had finished the frame for Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Hunt went to see it and told him it was quite satisfactory. ‘Ah,’ said Green, ‘but you’ll see the picture will set it off amazingly.’
— Henry Holiday, Reminiscences of My Life, 1914
In his 2007 history The Slave Ship, Marcus Rediker reports that sharks would sometimes follow slave ships entirely across the Atlantic, “that they might devour the bodies of the dead when thrown overboard,” in the words of veteran captain Hugh Crow. Observer Alexander Falconbridge wrote that sharks swarmed “in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of the negroes.”
A notice published in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1785 reads, “The many Guineamen lately arrived here have introduced such a number of overgrown sharks, (The constant attendants on the vessels from the coasts) that bathing in the river is become extremely dangerous, even above town.”
In a natural history of sharks published in 1774, Oliver Goldsmith tells of a “rage for suicide” aboard one ship, whose captain made an example of one woman by lowering her into the water:
“When the poor creature was thus plunged in, and about half way down, she was heard to give a terrible shriek, which at first was ascribed to her fears of drowning; but soon after, the water appearing red all around her, she was drawn up, and it was found that a shark, which had followed the ship, had bit her off from the middle.”
When an editor complained that Gerald Kersh used too many long words, Kersh bet him £50 that he could write a story entirely in monosyllables. Kersh won:
We met on the stairs of Time: I was on my way up; he was on his way down. I was young; he was old, and poor — so poor that he did not know when luck would send him a meal and a bed.
Frederic Birmingham published the whole three-page story in his 1958 book The Writer’s Craft.
According to a popular story, a resident of Mechelen, Belgium, emerged unsteadily from an inn one foggy night in 1687, looked up at St. Rumbold’s Cathedral, and raised an alarm — the tower was on fire.
Residents flung open their windows and saw the same reddish glow. The rumor raised an uproar, and the mayor organized a chain of volunteers to pass buckets of water up the tower stairway.
Before they reached the top, though, the fog cleared and the alarm was called off. The red glow had been only the moon’s light shining through the tower’s red bell windows.
Ever since, residents of Mechelen have been known as Maneblussers, or moon extinguishers.
On May 19, 1914, G. Howell Parr of Baltimore lay down and rolled three continuous miles to win a bet of $1,000. Details, from the New York Times:
Wagered $1,000 he could roll three miles.
Made the time limit June 1.
Started at 8 o’clock last night from the Elk Ridge Kennels.
Finished at 11:10 A M. to-day at Charles Street and University Parkway.
Rolled fifteen hours and ten minutes, with intermissions for rest.
Covered approximately 15,840 feet, or about three miles.
Took about four feet to a roll.
Made about 3,960 rolls.
Won the $1,000.
Every time he rolled he won about 25 cents.
He wore football gear and turned with every fourth revolution into a pillowed chair positioned by his friends, where he’d rest for 30 seconds. “At times the wife approached him solicitously and asked how he felt. He always looked up at her, and smiled and said: ‘Feel fine.'”
Indeed, he felt well enough afterward to go to the racetrack, “where several of his horses were on the day’s programme.” “When asked where he felt the strain of the rolling most, he said, ‘At my wrists; I put so much weight on them.'”