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If you write historical fiction, it helps to know what your characters were reading, and their reactions. Did you know that Dicken's "Olde Curiousity Shop" was originally published as a serialized story in a magazine? Fans waited anxiously for each new installment and discussed whether "Little Nell" really had to die. When that issue was delivered across the Atlantic by ship (remember, there was no faster way), hundreds of people waited at the docks to be among the first to find out what happened to her.
The Keepsake was an illustrated anthology of poetry and prose sold annually from 1828 to 1857 during the Christmas season as gifts, for middle-class women. Bound in sparkling crimson watered silk with gilt-edged pages, The Keepsake featured elegant, steel-plate engravings of fashionable women, travel scenes, and romantic story pictures. Keepsake literature was sometimes written to accompany the illustrations, but not always. The 1829 Keepsake features contributions from nearly every literary celebrity of the period, such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Moore, Robert Southey, L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon).
Dime novels were the pulp fiction magazines of the past and provide a glimpse into the popular attitudes of late 1800s. The stories reflected the social issues of the day and included stories about: detective adventures, society romances, rags-to-riches, songbooks, jokebooks, and handbooks. The Library of Congress has in its collection the famous serials Black Mask, Weird Tales, and Amazing Stories, with stories by such famous authors as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Wonder what some of those "dime-store" novels looked like? Click here
If you were lucky, you might have received a pop-up book as a child.
The list is endless, all of it part of your own consciousness and of the common consciousness. And it binds you as it binds us all to the day and to the very moment when precisely that list and only that list is possible."
"If Albert Einstein is right once again—as he is—then hard as it may be to comprehend, " then ...still exists."
....quoted from Time And Again by Jack Finney.
"You know the year, the day and the month, for literally millions of reasons: because the blanket you woke up under this morning may have been at least partly synthetic; because there is probably a box in your apartment with a switch; turn that switch, and the faces of living human beings will appear on a glass screen in the face of that box and speak nonsense to you....And because millions and millions of a million of still other such facts will confront you all day long....
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