Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.
An old junk-shop or an old-junk shop; an old shop that sells curiosities, or a shop that sells old curiosities? One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and I wondered idly whether the Spanish translators hadn’t all got it wrong -perhaps misled by the building’s current, posh aspect- and whether it shouldn’t have been La vieja…
In 1927 the Catalan literary researcher and writer, Ramon Miquel i Planas (1874-1950; henceforth MiP) wrote a little book, published in a bibliophile edition, called La llegenda del llibreter assassí. In it he reflects on the origins and recycling of “Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac”, an anonymous tale published as if true in 1836…
This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is…
It may not have worked, but nineteenth century medicine often sounds rather fun. This from An Epitome of Braithwaite’s Retrospect of practical medicine and surgery (1860): M. Lallemand, of Montpellier, has great confidence in aromatic bitters, to which a small portion of brandy has been added, followed by active friction of the loins… As internal…
I obviously don’t subscribe to this kind of over-familiar nonsense, but here anyway is Dickens in Household words (via Google Print) in 1856: There have not been wanting theorists who have recognised in the apparently constant opposition of the north and south a kind of natural law, by which both are destined to be regulated,…
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13 Dismiss
![Richard Tanner, late Inspector in the Metropolitan Detective Police Force. Born October 30th 1831, died October 19th 1873. [Also wife and mother-in-law.]](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-xofHafv88w4/T_wWdZwAO2I/AAAAAAABASs/EROVgCGThps/s1000/P1090088.JPG "Richard Tanner, late Inspector in the Metropolitan Detective Police Force. Born October 30th 1831, died October 19th 1873. [Also wife and mother-in-law.]")