This advertisement for a runaway slave appeared in the Kentucky Gazette in Lexington, January 22, 1791. There are still those who suppose that slavery was a benevolent institution, on the grounds that slave-owners had a financial interest in keeping their property in good condition. If you meet one of those deluded persons, dear reader, you may point him to original documents such as this.
Would you like to have the whole roast for yourself? A book printed in Lyons in 1586 tells us how we can drive all the other guests away from the table.
In a curious (and very rare) book of ghost stories called Beware the Cat, William Baldwin, a printer’s assistant, describes the gruesome sight of the remains of drawn and quartered men displayed at Aldgate in London. He does not approve of the practice.
Rumors had begun to circulate in 1680 that James, heir to the British throne, was a Roman Catholic. Here a pamphleteer undertakes to defend the Duke from these scurrilous charges.
In 1635, a certain Scottish gentleman named David Person was quite certain that he knew how to make the philosopher’s stone, which would transmute any substance into any other; and he was quite certain that it was no very hard thing to make. Why, then, do chemical philosophers not make themselves absurdly rich? Well…