In the ‘Old India House’ may still be seen a quarto volume of Interest Tables, on the fly-leaf of which is written, in Charles Lamb’s round, clerkly hand,–
‘A book of much interest.’–Edinburgh Review
‘A work in which the interest never flags.’–Quarterly Review
‘We may say of this volume, that the interest increases from the beginning to the end.’–Monthly Review
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
levament
n. “the comfort which one hath of his wife”
(Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie, 1623)
In 1863, the register of the U.S. Treasury, L.E. Chittenden, had to sign 12,500 bonds in a single weekend to stop the delivery of two British-built warships to the Confederacy. He started at noon on Friday and managed 3,700 signatures in the first seven hours, but by Saturday morning he was desperate:
[E]very muscle on the right side connected with the movement of the hand and arm became inflamed, and the pain was almost beyond endurance. … In the slight pauses which were made, rubbing, the application of hot water, and other remedies were resorted to, in order to alleviate the pain and reduce the inflammation. They were comparatively ineffectual, and the hours dragged on without bringing much relief.
He finished, exhausted, at noon on Sunday, completing a mountain of bonds more than 6 feet high. These were rushed to a waiting steamer — and only then did word come that the English warships had been sold to a different buyer. The bonds, in the end, were not needed.
The year 1818 was a kind of Annus Mirabilis. The amount of all the figures together was eighteen, which was also the sum expressed by the first two, as well as the last two, and also reckoned singly, either forwards or backwards: an arithmetical combination which can never happen again.
— The Nic-Nac; or, Oracle of Knowledge, May 24, 1823
In 2007, hunters caught a 50-ton bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska. Lodged in its neck they found a fragment of a bomb lance that had been manufactured in New Bedford, Mass., in 1890.
This means the whale was 115 to 130 years old. It might have been born in the same year that Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president.
In 1975, firefighters were checking a Greenwich Village apartment building when they entered the flat of 58-year-old attorney Joseph Feldman and discovered more than 15,000 New York Public Library books “piled to the ceiling, covering the stove and filling the bathtub and sinks,” according to a New York Times report.
Feldman, who didn’t even have a library card, explained, “I like to read.” Twenty men removed the books in seven truckloads. A library spokesman said Feldman might be charged the standard fine of 10 cents per book per day, up to the cost of the book, but I can’t find a record of the final judgment.
“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them,” wrote Anatole France. “The only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”
In 1938, a wallet manufacturer in Lockport, N.Y., decided to include sample Social Security cards in its products. The company’s vice president thought it would be clever to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Whitcher.
It wasn’t. The sample card was half-size, printed in red, and bore the word SPECIMEN in large letters, but by 1943 more than 5,000 people were using Whitcher’s number as their own. The Social Security Administration voided the card and started a publicity campaign to educate users, but over the years more than 40,000 people reported the number as their own, some as recently as 1977.
“They started using the number,” Whitcher marveled. “They thought it was their own. I can’t understand how people can be so stupid. I can’t understand that.”
New Yorker founder Harold Ross was so pleased with the magazine’s dandified mascot, Eustace Tilley, that he bought a listing in his name in the New York City telephone directory.
He was triumphant when the city sent Tilley a personal property tax bill.
(Staff writer Brendan Gill described Ross as “aggressively ignorant.” When Robert Benchley referred to Andromache in one manuscript, Ross scribbled “Who he?” Benchley wrote back, “You keep out of this.”)
Considerable excitement was caused in our city last Tuesday evening by the announcement that a hailstone weighing eighty pounds had fallen six miles west of Salina, near the railroad track. An inquiry into the matter revealed the following facts: A party of railroad section men were at work Tuesday afternoon, several miles west of town, when the hailstorm came upon them. Mr. Martin Elwood, the foreman of the party, relates that near where they were at work hailstones of the weight of four or five pounds were falling, and that returning to Salina the stones increased in size, until his party discovered a huge mass of ice weighing, as near as he could judge, in the neighborhood of eighty pounds. At this place the party found the ground covered with hail as if a wintry storm had passed over the land. Besides securing the mammoth chunk of ice, Mr. Elwood secured a hailstone something over a foot long, three or four inches in diameter, and shaped like a cigar. These ‘specimens’ were placed upon a hand-car and brought to Salina. Mr. W.J. Hagler, the North Santa Fe merchant, became the possessor of the larger piece, and saved it from dissolving by placing it in sawdust at his store. Crowds of people went down to see it Tuesday afternoon, and many were the theories concerning the mysterious visitor. At evening its dimensions were 29 by 16 by 2 inches.
— Salina (Kan.) Journal, quoted in Scientific American, Aug. 19, 1882
Musing on the housing problem in 1909, Edgar Chambless dreamed of laying a modern skyscraper on its side and extending it into the country. This two-story “continuous house” would be “a workable way of coupling housing and transportation into one mechanism,” with a monorail in the cellar, farmland on either side, and a path on the roof for cyclists and roller skaters.
“The Roadtown is a scheme to organize production, transportation and consumption into one systematic plan,” Chambless wrote in a 1910 manifesto. “In an age of pipes and wires, and high speed railways such a plan necessitates the building in one dimension instead of three.”
Chambless’ friend Milo Hastings promoted the idea in magazine articles, and the American Institute of Architects recognized it in a 1919 contest to present “the best solution of the housing problem.” Thomas Edison even donated the use of certain patents. Alas, though Chambless promoted his dream until his death in 1936, it never got off the drawing board.