Ralph Adams Cram, possibly the greatest Gothic architect the United States ever produced, was both a poet in stone and the knight of the Grail whose adventures the stone chronicled.
A little paragraph from 1887, reprinted in a trade magazine called The American Architect and Building News, suggests that journalists had a lot more fun in the nineteenth century.
Here is a little pamphlet for vistors to The Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, in which the editors lay down a few rules and expectations for their guests.
This Latin treatise from 1691 was translated by Edmund Goldsmid as part of his collection of “curious tracts” published in very limited editions. It is a treasury of wrong science, and full of delightful misinformation.
