dustjacket

I love to mentally collect suspiciously specific, weird, and funny book titles. What are some of the most interesting, shocking, hilarious books you've seen in the stacks?

This one is one of my favorites:

'What seek you in this sunny field?'

Graybeard, to whom he thus appealed,

Slow raised his head

'A Phantom Future I pursue!’

Disclaimer: I have not read this book, just did a little breeze. AND it was hard to find anything on the author, Miss Anne Hirst. Especially since Michael Hirst & Anne Gracie wrote the popular The Tudors book series.

Imagine the aha moment when I finally decided to search for the title in our library catalog and came across… “Anne Hirst [pseudonym]”

I’m mostly confident that Miss Anne Hirst is actually Henry Becker Hirst, truthfully because of this one line in Heather Anne Hannah’s PhD thesis titled Male Use of a Female Pseudonym in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature:

“Well-known Philadelphia poet and lawyer Henry Hirst contributed some of his poignant, romantic poems to The Ladies’ Companion (1834-1844), under the pseudonym Mrs Anna Maria Hirst (or Anna M. Hirst). Published in New York, The Ladies’ Companion was one of the leading women’s magazines in the United States.”

Even further down the rabbit hole, I find Henry Becker Hirst popping up on The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore’s site. In my brief readings I’ve gathered that Hirst was a lawyer, poet, and absinthe drinking companion of Poe and owned an exotic bird store. Further, Hirst, with Poe’s assistance, was the author of a popular biographical article (about Poe) published in the Philadelphia newspaper Saturday Museum on February 25, 1843. I’m seeing that today it is considered to be filled with misinformation (whether that be Hirst or Poe’s doing) and seen as a curiosity. Hirst wrote a parody of Poe’s “The Haunted Palace” called “The Ruined Tavern,” which apparently enraged Poe. Even more, it looks like there’s some major drama having to do with Hirst (selling, misplacing, letting someone borrow) some sort of Poe manuscript.

Unfortunately Hirst came to a sad end, becoming “an object of pity, roaming the streets wearing strange outfits and imagining himself to be in turn various presidents, emperors, kings, and queens.” And “Purring like a cat and swaying his body to and fro to the rhythm he was trying, he would jot down words here and there with intervals left to be filled in.” Finally, he was committed to the insane department of the Blockley Almshouse where he died at the age of sixty.

Not gonna lie, my sympathies are few to this man who wrote as a woman giving courting advice to other women like,

“Never, at this stage of the game (and if you’re wise, not for a long time after) go into a monologue of what you think, believe, eat, drink, etc. And don’t drag into the conversation events and people which are of necessity foreign to him; that can only throw a fog over this precious moment and blur his impression of you.”

And *eyeroll* the dedication: “To my husband whose unfailing sympathy and abiding wisdom make it possible for me to do my job.”

Hirst, you’re the worst! (Sorry you’re mental).

Hirst bio’s here: https://www.eapoe.org/people/hirsthb.htm

And here: http://lawlit.net/lp-2001/hirst.html

Hirst and Poe’s accusation of plagiarism: https://www.eapoe.org/works/stedwood/sw0813.htm

Poe and Hirst, drinking buddies: https://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poealchl.htm

What a freaking cute children’s book and fascinating lady full of firsts. A unique person had to have come out of parents named William Whipple Patch Jr. and Salome Jenks.

Edith Patch had an interest in nature from a young age and even won $25 for an essay on the monarch butterfly (about $700 in today’s money). I tried to package up a nice little summary of her accomplishments, but since they are great and many, we’re listing today:

Edith was one of the first environmentalists (not even, “female environmentalist”) of her time

Edith graduated high school, a woman, in the late 1800s

In 1901 she earned a degree from the University of Minnesota

Edith was hired as an English / possibly Etymology professor at the University of Maine. The university would maybe make a position for her if she proved herself after a year. She did. She became the first woman scientist employed by the University.

In 1910 she earned a master's degree from the University of Maine

A year later, she earned a Ph.D. from Cornell University

In 1913 she became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

In 1924 she became the first woman to head the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station

In 1930 she was elected president of the American Nature Study Society AND IN THE SAME YEAR, elected the first female president of the Entomological Society of America

Tons of other awards, honorary titles, publications, books, writing for magazines, etc.

Her house, which was purchased in 1913 and named Brayside, is a gothic revival farmhouse with 50 acres of land near the University of Maine. Through the work of the community, it is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1936, Dr. Patch gave a speech for the Maine Agricultural News Radio Program titled “Aphids, Aphids, Everywhere,” that explained the dangers of using insecticides. This was 26 years Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring, which is given credit for igniting the environmental movement in the 1960s.

Check out the cutest bespectacled picture (and a deep dive into) Dr. Edith Patch here: https://edithmarionpatch.wordpress.com/about-edith-marion-patch/

Traveling in trousers?! What bricky ladies. Doff those at once, I say!

I’ll admit it was the title that caught my attention, but once I found that this book focuses on the adventures of seven real lady travelers who fearlessly visited the remote corners of the earth, it became a lot more interesting.

The author, Dorothy Middleton, was a lady traveler herself and holds some impressive accolades in the scholarly geography world. She was assistant editor of The Geographical Journal for 20 years, served on the society’s Library and Maps Committee and became one of it’s longest-serving members, was made an honorary fellow in 1971, honorary vice-president in 1987, and was one of the first women elected to the Geographical Dining Club (150 years after it’s foundation).

Find a copy near you using worldcat to learn more about Isabella Bird Bishop, Kate Marsden, May French Sheldon, Lady Franklin, Mrs. Mary Somerville, Mary Kingley, and Fanny Bullock Workman.

You’ll have to keep in mind that this is relationship advice from 123 years ago. But the wife as a cook and husband as dinner comparison has got me chuckling. So do these first few sentences:

“A great many husbands are spoiled by mismanagement. Some women go about it as if their husbands were bladders, and blow them up; others keep them constantly in hot water; others let them freeze, by their carelessness and indifference. Some keep them in a stew, by irritating ways and words; others roast them; some keep them in pickle all their lives. Now it is not to be supposed that any husband will be good, managed in this way—turnips wouldn’t; onions wouldn’t; cabbage-heads wouldn’t, and husbands won’t; but they are really delicious when properly treated.”

Learn how to cook up your own husband, free and online! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26210

Originally published in 1822

Pictured edition published in 1997

How many times in a deadpan tone have we said, “story of my life.” I know mine does not (yet) compare to Giacomo Casanova’s.

I have not entered university at age 12, “bought a long sword...with my hair cut in side whiskers and a long false pigtail” and “set forth to impress the whole city” as a soldier, learned the violin, been imprisoned for gambling debt and then escaped with a priest “by gondola at sunrise," pretended to be a 300 year old alchemist, or used my ability to say anything with a straight face to work as a spy.

And of course never been what is most associated with the name Casanova: a serial seducer (during his lifetime he claimed to have seduced 122 women, including a nun).

“He was also a prolific writer who documented his adventures and love affairs in a steamy memoir,” perhaps exaggerated, but nonetheless considered a detailed description of 18th-century European society.

The national library of France was really flashing the big bucks when they purchased Casanova's original 3,700 page manuscript for $9.6 million.

If you’re really trying to read all 3,700 pages, check WorldCat for a copy near you, or I highly recommend these articles here: https://www.walksofitaly.com/blog/art-culture/casanova-the-lover-venice-italy

And here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/who-was-casanova-160003650/