All posts in Featured Books

The North Sea—at least according to Walter Wood—was awash in blood and fish.

Where were they going? That is what the majority of the 44,000 soldiers and sailors on 400 French ships must have been thinking up until they landed near Alexandria on July 2, 1798.

In celebration of Beatrix Potter’s birthday on July 28th, 1866, today’s book of the week explores rabbits: The Rabbit, by James Edmund Harting, with a Chapter on Cookery, by Alexander Innes Shand.  This book was published in 1898 as part of the Fur, Feather and Fin Series, edited by A. E. T.

Harrison Weir, President of the National Cat Club, Judge at the first cat show in London, and all-around cat lover and enthusiast. This book of the week, an 1889 work entitled, Our Cats and All About Them: Their Varieties, Habits, and Management; and for Show, The Standard of Excellence and Beauty; Described and Pictured by Harrison Weir, F.R.H.S., was written by Harrison Weir, President of the National Cat Club which he formed in 1887. What is equally delightful to Weir’s loving descriptions of cats, their looks and their behavior, are his beautiful illustrations of cats throughout the book.

By now, you’ve probably heard the buzz about Magicicada septendecim: a type of cicada that only appears every 17 years in unimaginably large numbers. Periodical cicadas like the Magicicada septendecim are unique to the United States, and occur in the northern midwest and eastern regions of the country. These cicadas have an interesting physiology and reproductive system, which is explored in our book of the week taken from the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Volume 89, Number 8: Morphology of the Insect Abdomen Part II: The Genital Ducts and Ovipositor, by R. E. Snodgrass.

Thanks to reality television shows like “Oddities” on the Science Channel, “Immortalized” on AMC, and “American Stuffers” on Animal Planet, there has been a resurgence in the popularity of taxidermy. The first instance of a dead organism being preserved and stuffed for display or learning purposes is not known with certainty, but in our book of the week, we’ll learn several theories on the origins of taxidermy—and most interestingly, how to perform it.

If you go by what J. L. Comstock, M.D., had to say in 1848 about what it was like to be a lady, times were difficult. In this week’s book of the week, Outlines of Physiology, both Comparative and Human; in which are Described the Mechanical, Animal, Vital, and Sensorial Organs and Functions; Also, The Application of These Principles to Muscular Exercise, and Female Fashions and Deformities, Comstock explains that young women were under enormous pressure to be aesthetically pleasing to men (not a bad goal, he points out), and this pressure to look good by wearing a corset or stays was causing rampant deformities, illness, and even death: “. . .I have no doubt that the ladies themselves, to a considerable extent, will agree with me in believing, that hundreds, nay thousands, of females literally kill themselves every year by this fashion in our own country: and if suicide is a crime, how will such escape in the day of final account!” (311).