Paul Collins's Blog, page 2

Pleasant Dreams

Some books are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and apparently others have greatness thrust upon them in the form of an Amazon gift card.

This hasn't gotten much play yet outside of California news blogs, but it should. When GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner's memoir (Mount Pleasant: What Happened When I Traded a Silicon Valley Board Room for an Inner City Classroom) hit the NY Times bestseller list last month, not a few people were puzzled; as a new posting on the San Jose ...

The Napoleon of Not a Clue

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most incoherent book title of 1907!


This description certainly sounds promising:Think they're joking about a detective love-story starring a delusional Napoleon reincarnation? Well, here's the frontispiece:

Come to Think of It, My Scalp IS Tingling...

From Harper's, 1886:

Tweet, Tweet

I'm now up on Twitter: twitter.com/thelitdetective

Do We Get Jetpacks This Time?

A New Scientist Histories column from '05 noted that the last really huge volcanic eruption led to the invention of the bicycle:

ON 5 April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia began to grumble. A week later the volcano blew its top in a spectacular eruption that went on until July. It was the biggest eruption in recorded history, killing around 92,000 people and ejecting so much ash into the atmosphere that average global temperatures dipped by 3 °C. In the northern hemisphere 1816 became...

Greetings from 1896

There's no way to embed it here, alas, but the Times of London has video of the newly discovered 1896 film that appears to be Australia's first movie:

Patineur Grotesque shows a bearded man, dressed in a top hat and smoking a cigar, rollerskating in a park before a circle of onlookers. He stops and lifts his jacket to reveal a white hand print on the bottom of his trousers in a cheeky gesture to the camera."