good luck.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

Easy search for your library system!

The Christian church began forbidding Christians from having professions that involved lending money, banking, or pawn work. It was because the church believed that money was ultimately unclean so although it was considered a necessity, Christians were instructed to deal with it as little as possible.

But someone still needed to run all of those money-based businesses. So these societies which were already run by Christian leadership basically made it a rule that these businesses had to be run by Jews since they were already “unclean”. Furthermore, due to other restrictions on Jewish people in these areas, these money-based positions were pretty much some of the only jobs Jews could legally hold.

This eventually led to numerous stereotypes involving Jews and money. And the acidity of these stereotypes grew when Christian people and leaders became resentful of the livelihood Jews were able to achieve for themselves with these jobs.

Jobs in showbusiness were seen as low-class, immoral, and beneath the dignity of proper Christians. But people still needed their entertainment, and someone needed to provide it, so who better than the Jews, who were already considered low-class, immoral, and beneath the dignity of proper Christians?

And once again, Christians have the nerve to resent Jews for being successful at jobs that they effectively forced us into for lack of other means to make a living.

If you were a smart, ambitious working-class Jewish kid in the 1920s and 30s, traditional paths to success were often barred to you. Colleges had quotas, realtors redlined, professional associations wouldn’t admit you. But there was no one to gatekeep the new forms of media that were springing up: film, radio, comic books, Broadway. You could succeed on your merits. Otherwise, the quickest ways up the ladder were professional sports and organized crime. If you couldn’t be Sandy Koufax and you didn’t want to be Meyer Lansky, you could try to be Mel Brooks or Stan Lee instead.

“I can order you to death,” Padmé said.

Her voice was so quiet that Sabé barely heard her. She reached out and took Padmé’s hands.

“And I would go,” she said.

“I can’t be that dedicated to you,” Padmé said.

“I know,” Sabé said.