Category:
Books
Webs in the Wind, published in 1949, is an odd, obscure book. The author, Winifred Duncan, decided that she wanted to learn more about spiders — creatures about which she previously had almost no knowledge.
To do so, she caught spiders outside, released them in her house, and then patiently observed their behavior as they went about building webs in her curtains, between pieces of furniture, behind her toilet, etc. Her book is full of illustrations of the spider webs throughout her house.
Only after observing the spiders for months did she start reading any of the existing scientific literature about spiders.
Used copies of her book are quite expensive, starting at around $35. But you can read the entire book for free at the
Hathitrust archive.
Once upon a time, each flower held a very specific symbolical meaning.
You can read about them in this book.
So be very careful next time you commission a bouquet for someone. You wouldn't want to include any white roses still in bud, lest you seem "ignorant of love."
In 1987, a wild moose fell in love with what zoologists refer to as a "biologically inappropriate object". His love interest was a cow named Jessica who lived on the Vermont farm of Larry Carrara.
For over two months the moose displayed courtship behavior towards Jessica. He followed her all around, would rest his head on her back, or would push hay toward her as a food offering.

The moose and Jessica
Over 75,000 sightseers came out to Carrara's farm to witness this interspecies romance.
Finally, after 76 days, rutting season came to an end and the moose lost interest in Jessica and wandered back into the wild.

The moose
The romance between the moose and Jessica inspired the book
A Moose for Jessica, written by Pat Wakefield with photographs by Larry Carrara.
It's available on Amazon, or
you can read it for free at archive.org.
More info:
wikipedia,
New England Living
His Wikipedia page tells us:
Parker became known as the "Hanging Judge" of the American Old West, because he sentenced numerous convicts to death.[1] In 21 years on the federal bench, Judge Parker tried 13,490 cases. In more than 8,500 of these cases, the defendant either pleaded guilty or was convicted at trial.[2] Parker sentenced 160 people to death; 79 were executed.
Read a memoir that appeared two years after his death at this link.
Anti-communist fable presented as a kid's book.
More pictures and discussion here.
By Lucy Staley from Hearthside Press. 1968.
This is the book to get you up to speed on the exciting art of table setting. From the review in
The Bradenton Herald (Dec 22, 1968):
It seems almost impossible that such a wealth of information covering all aspects of table-setting has been condensed in this one book. The novice who usually pales at such terms as balance, dominance, rhythm, proportion, etc. can relax — it's all here but in a manner easily understood.
You can get it on loan from archive.org.

"Table for a Hawaiian luau"

"Easter dessert table"

"Strutting cocks from Spain frame an arangement in a basket"
Back in 1979, when being in
Who's Who still had some kind of cultural cachet, Derek Evans and Dave Fulwiler decided to create an anti-Who's-Who, which they called "Who's Nobody in America." To acquire entries, they placed the following ad in newspapers:
AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO NOBODY
Will your name be omitted from the 1980 edition of Who's Who?
Nobody Press is currently compiling the 1980 edition of Who's Nobody in America. This handsomely bound and widely distributed reference work will, for the first time, provide a comprehensive list of American nobodies.
If you think you might be a nobody, or know of one, at no cost or obligation, complete the attached request for applications."
Applicants included:
- A woman who complained she had been seeing her psychiatrist monthly for eight years and he often called her Evelyn. Her name was Mildred.
- An entire American Legion post in Newport, Ky.
More info:
Washington Post
According to the Rev. Franklin Loehr, prayer could supercharge the growth of plants. Pretty much any prayer would work. He detailed his argument in his 1959 book
The Power of Prayer on Plants.
When Richard Nixon was told of Loehr's results, he reportedly said, "That sounds like a good kind of thinking to me."
However, in 1961,
a group of Harvard students tried to replicate Loehr's results and failed to do so. In fact, in their experiment the plants that weren't prayed for at all grew better than plants that were prayed for by either skeptics or believers.
More details from
Newsweek (Apr 13, 1959):
Prayer Food
Can prayer make plants grow faster and bigger? Skeptics think it laughable, scientists find it irrelevant, and farmers tend to rely on more mundane methods to increase their crops. But the Rev. Franklin Loehr is convinced that the answer is yes, and has just written a book, "The Power of Prayer on Plants," to tell why.
After five years and 900 experiments, the 46-year-old Presbyterian minister reports he and 150 members of his prayer group found that prayed-for wheat and corn seeds grew into bigger seedlings than ones which got no prayer or outright negative prayer. Commenting on their methods last week in his Los Angeles home, Mr. Loehr explained that they used every kin of prayer and found every one effective to a degree.
"There were silent and spoken prayers," he continued, "those to loved ones, and the humble prayer straight to God. But mostly people just talked to the plants, loved them, or scolded them. First I tried buddying up to them, and then I observed that the people getting better results were approaching the plants on their own level of consciousness."
Picking up a copy of the book, he pointed to the jacket, which shows a lone, stunted shoot on the no-prayer side of an experimental seedbed. "He wasn't supposed to be there," explained Mr. Loehr, "so we blighted him with three bursts of negative command."
Mr. Loehr dropped the experiments two years ago, having persuaded himself, at least, of their validity. He is now concentrating on "soul dynamics" prayer for people—not, of course, to make them grow faster and bigger. "The fact is," he concluded, "we used plants to test prayer just as the artificial heart is tested in dogs instead of humans."
Along similar lines, see our previous post
"Does holy water help radishes grow better?"
Published by the National Temperance League of London in 1897. It contained 113 portraits of teetotalers who were over the age of 80.
Unfortunately, there was no companion volume of Octogenarian Tipplers.

image source: Bizarre Books