In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angostura_aromatic_bitters_dD.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

argute
adj. sharp, as a taste

missment
n. a mistake, an error

mauvais quart d’heure
n. a short period of time which is embarrassing and unnerving

deligible
adj. worthy to be chosen

The label on Angostura bitters is larger than the bottle. When company founder Johann Siegert died, his sons planned to enter the tonic in a competition and divided the preparatory work between them. One oversaw the design of a new bottle, the other of a new label. They failed to coordinate the work, and by the time the mismatch was apparent they had no choice but to use the oversize labels. The oddity was so distinctive that it’s been retained as a branding measure.

(Thanks, Colin.)

The Augsburg Book of Miracles

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Augsburger_Wunderzeichenbuch_%E2%80%94_Folio_85.jpg

What is this? A mysterious illuminated manuscript seems to have appeared in Augsburg, Germany, around 1550, but no one knows who created it or for whom. The name of Augsburg printmaker Hans Burgkmair appears on one page, so he’s thought to be a contributor, but the manuscript contains no introduction, title page, table of contents, or dedication; instead it launches directly into a catalog of divine wonders and marvels of nature, each illustrated in full color.

“The manuscript is something of a prodigy in itself, it must be said,” wrote Marina Warner in the New York Review of Books in 2014. “[I]ts existence was hitherto unknown, and silence wraps its discovery; apart from the attribution to Augsburg, little is certain about the possible workshop, or the patron for whom such a splendid sequence of pictures might have been created.” Here it is.

All’s Fair

https://bibliophilly.library.upenn.edu/viewer.php?id=Oversize%20Ms.%20Codex%20109#page/276/mode/2up

The Feuer Buech, a 1584 treatise on munitions by Franz Helm, contains a startling illustration: a cat and a bird approaching a town, each bearing a lighted explosive.

The image accompanies a section titled “To set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise”; Penn curator Mitch Fraas translates the relevant section:

Create a small sack like a fire-arrow … if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.

Fortunately it appears this was never carried into practice … though possibly birds have been used for this purpose in Russia.

In a Word

https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Maps_Terms_of_Use#where-data
Image: OpenStreetMap

rarachose
adj. rare, unusual

selcouth
adj. extraordinary in appearance

cordate
adj. heart-shaped

trothplight
n. engagement to be married

The Croatian islet Galešnjak, in the Pašman Canal of the Adriatic Sea, is one of the few naturally occurring heart-shaped objects in the world.

It’s uninhabited, but the family that owns it provides facilities for engagements and weddings.

Local News

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_cemetery_plaque.jpg

The cemetery at Aurora, Texas, bears a notable marker from the state’s historical commission: “This site is also well known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot, killed in the crash, was buried here.”

An April 1897 article by S.E. Haydon in the Dallas Morning News explains that “the airship which has been sailing through the country” had had a fatal accident in Aurora:

It was traveling due north, and much nearer the earth than ever before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.

The pilot, purportedly a Martian, was carrying papers bearing indecipherable hieroglyphics. The ship, “built of an unknown metal,” was “too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power.”

The story has been inspiring investigations for more than a century, but one item stands out. In a 1980 interview in Time magazine, 86-year-old Aurora resident Etta Pegues said that Haydon had invented the story “as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying.”

(Thanks, Meaghan.)

Reconnaissance

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boji_toplu_ta%C5%9F%C4%B1ma_arac%C4%B1nda,_%C4%B0stanbul.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 2021, Istanbul’s public rail service spotted a curious passenger: “We noticed a dog using our metros and trains and he knows where to go,” spokesman Aylin Erol told India Today. “He knows where to get out. It’s like he has a purpose.”

The dog, known as Boji, is a stray Anatolian shepherd who’s been observed using the city’s buses, metro trains, trams, and ferries. Since city officials fitted him with a microchip, he’s been tracked through as many as 29 metro stations in one day, traveling up to 30 kilometers and ranging as far afield as the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara.

“You take the train and, suddenly, you see Boji,” Erol said. “And look at him. He lies, just like this. You just smile and catch the moment, really. This is what Boji evokes for Istanbulites. He also reminds us that we can still enjoy Istanbul as we rush about.”

Sweet Dreams

https://archive.org/details/sim_strand-magazine_july-december-1894_8/page/306/mode/2up?view=theater

In an 1894 feature on peculiar furniture, the Strand describes a “suffocating bedstead” used to dispatch unwitting inn guests in the days of coach travel:

Nothing whatever of a suspicious character revealed itself to the eye of the wayfarer, yet when the scoundrel who meditated crime had satisfied himself that the man slept, he would quickly lower an interior portion of the canopy of the bedstead, firmly imprisoning him in an air-tight cavity until suffocation ensued. Struggling and shouting would be useless under such circumstances, as the weight of the box would be tremendous.

This recalls Wilkie Collins’ 1852 story “A Terribly Strange Bed,” in which a visitor at a Paris gambling house realizes the canopy over his bed is moving:

It descended — the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came down — down — close down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze my finger between the bed-top and the bed. I felt at the sides, and discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary light canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress, the substance of which was concealed by the valance and its fringe. I looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare. In the middle of the bed-top was a huge wooden screw that had evidently worked it down through a hole in the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down on the substance selected for compression.

In his preface to the collection in which that story appears, Collins claims that it’s “entirely of my own imagining, constructing, and writing” but credits painter W.S. Herrick for “the curious and interesting facts” on which it’s based. The Strand article, published 40 years later, doesn’t mention Collins, but perhaps the idea had entered English folklore by that point. Or maybe it’s true!