An evocative woodcut of drunken frat boys falling down in the streets of Schenectady among the swine, from what stands as likely the first attack in literature on college fraternities: The Spy-Glass, edited by Fabricus Videns [Schenectady, 1840].

As the climactic canto the the “Modern Epic” included herein would have it,

“The swine, that chanc’d just then to stretch
Their quiet snouts along the ditch,
Much frightened at so queer a sight,
Gave each a grunt and took to flight.
Now Nature, as physicians say,
Provides for each emergency;
And when the stomach is oppress’d
With more than is can well digest,
It will most certainly complain,
And send its burthen out again.
And so, you see, it happened here,
Despite the pressure of the beer,
For, while our heroes’ dizzy heads,
Were resting on their pliant beds,
Their gin and oysters raised a rout,
And with a mighty rush came out.
Their loving friends, so good and wise,
All gather’d round to sympathise.”

(Sounds like a weekend in Ann Arbor after a football game.)

“Justice would be worth more to women than chivalry, if they could not have both. A working girl put the case in a nutshell when she said: ‘I would gladly stand for twenty minutes in the street car going home if by doing so I could get the same pay that a man would have had for doing my day’s work.’”

(From Alice Stone Blackwell’s “Objections Answered,” collected in Woman Suffrage: History, Arguments and Results, New York, 1915.)

From the July 30, 1979 program for W.W.F. championship wrestling at Madison Square Gardens:

“The Grand Wizard and Greg Valentine happily pose with the lead guitarist for Blondie (Heart of Glass) Chris.”

(Chris Stein of Blondie, with Ernie Roth—aka “The Grand Wizard of Wrestling”—and Hall of Fame wrestler John Wisniski, Jr., best known for wrestling as Greg Valentine. Debbie Harry later appeared as a female wrestler in the wrestling play Teaneck Tanzi alongside Andy Kaufman.)

Standley Gautereaux, the California Franco-American whose explicit rhapsodic 1907 work of sexual liberation, Women, I Love You! got him in hot water with the authorities and evidently clapped into jail for obscenity.

(This portrait taken from the copy from the library of noted scholar of the obscene, Gershon Legman.)

“Sailing kits is the most healthful outdoor sport for a boy or girl. Parents should encourage their children in this kind of amusement. It is clean and free from all dangers incident to rough games.”

(From a nice promotional price list for the patented Clawson Star Kite, ca. 1911-1920?)

Get your pineal gland in line and you will be a hit when you leer at fellow guests at any social gathering!

(From a moderately kooky promotional pamphlet for a Willis Sheeman’s Depression-era book of self-improvement that suggests generating thought fluid in the pineal gland, boosting brain energy, and balancing your mineral salts to develop sexual potency and mental mastery over business rivals.)

“For the convenient and inoffensive care and removal of swill or garbage, melting and rendering scraps, etc.”

Garbage barrel Model No. 3 (“For Family Use”) from a promotional brochure from the wonderfully named Eagle Odorless Apparatus Company, ca. 1881-1883.

25,000 trays of prunes!

Clearly this suggests a bounty that cries out for investment in the California Condensed Fruit and Vegetable Company—“a Non-Speculative Manufacturing proposition”-and its novel plans for national Prune Syrup Distribution.

(From a detailed 1909 prospectus from former telegraph agent and Oakland, Calif. resident T. E. Hunt, The Earning Power of Money.)

nevver:

E.B. White

(via theparisreview)