Day: October 30, 2009

A Few NCC Tricks and Treats

Just in time for Halloween! Found in the stacks …

cookingtokill1

Murgatroyd, Ebenezer, with illustrations by Herb Roth.  Cooking to Kill!  The Poison Cookbook.  Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, ca. 1951.

This book is a great source of “comic recipes for the ghoul, cannibal, witch & murderer.”   It also includes inspired illustrations after each recipe.

libraryghost

Carole Boston Weatherford. The Library Ghost. Fort Atkinson, WI: Upstart Books, 2006.

A librarian discovers a ghost lurking around her library at night trying to solve a riddle.

And last, but not least, a general interest essay titled, “All Halloween” by E.A. Hawes, published in the 1902 University Magazine.  This essay accounts several Halloween practices and superstitions, my favorite being:  “A similar rite is removing the yolk of a boiled egg, filling one half with sale and eating at “bed-time,” without drinking water.  If your dreams are of water, you will marry, if not, death will find you single.”

Virgilina? Caroginia? No way, said Lincoln

“[Secretary of War Edwin M.] Stanton had come armed with a plan, drawn up at the President’s request, for bringing the states that had been ‘abroad’ back into what Lincoln… called ‘their proper practical relation with the Union.’  The War Secretary’s notion was that military occupation should precede readmission, and in this connection he proposed that Virginia and North Carolina be combined in a single district to simplify the army’s task.

“[Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Welles took exception, on grounds that this last would destroy the individuality of both states and thus be ‘in conflict with the principles of self-government which I deem essential.’ So did Lincoln….

“[Lincoln] had reached certain bedrock conclusions: ‘We can’t undertake to run state governments in all these Southern states. Their own people must do that — though I reckon at first some of them may do it badly.'”

— From a recounting of President Lincoln’s last day in “The Civil War: A Narrative” (1958-1974) by Shelby Foote