Category: Digital Highlights

It’s the time of year, after all! This gorgeous cover from the 1879 Familiar garden flowers is only a suggestion of the many beautiful color plates inside:

One of the many beautiful plates from Benjamin Maund’s 1825 The botanic garden. You can flip through the volume below or see it in our collection on IA!

It’s difficult to tell how close to the truth the reader is meant to believe the Passages from the diary of a late physician are — I suspect either not very or only close enough to titillate. Samuel Warren is the physician in question and the two volumes of his Passages are as full of drama as anything Dickens or Trollope plotted out: the struggle of early education, titled patients, mysterious requests, it’s all here!

If you need to plan a summer project, may we suggest organizing your own medical library? Bayard Holmes has the perfect step by step for you in his 1895 article. Click to see it in our IA collection or you can page through it below.

Better weather calls for something a little light, possibly something you can pick up and put down easily, and the 1815 New family receipt-book fits the bill beautifully.

Including, over “eight hundred valuable receipts” covering topics from agriculture to writing, this is veritable mine of household knowledge.

A frisky little number was added to our collection recently: The conjugal directory, or, The joys of hymen: a poem: in three books!

From Ellwood Hendrick’s 1916 article for the American Red Cross magazine about Winifred Holt.

From Owen Simmons’s 1913 The Book of Bread — lots of good stuff in here! I’m a pretty good baker and I’ve never heard of ‘scalded flour’!

I don’t think we have many items in the collection that include music, but William Kitchiner’s 1827 The traveller’s oracle includes seven songs!

Perhaps less of a “philosophy” — which implies a systematization — and more of a “description”, Robert Macnish’s 1836 volume is heavily influenced by phrenological thought and full of great anecdotes of dreams and nightmares.

Flip through it here or on the item’s page in our collection.