Funny rhymes!
Ye Comical Rhymes of Ancient Times, Dug Up Into Jokes For Small Folks (New York: Hurd & Houghton, circa 1864)
Laughing! Out! Loud!!!
The Laughable Game of What D’Ye Buy
A set of a popular card game.
This edition published around 1850 by S. Hart & Co. in Philadelphia.
No rules included.
Choco-Choc
A group of labels for brands of chocolate sold in France in the middle of the 19th century.
Visualizing History
Pages from Elizabeth Peabody’s Universal History: Arranged to Illustrate Bem’s Charts of Chronology. New York: Pub. for the author by Sheldon and Co, 1859.
A system for charting historical events on a grid (representing historical periods, arranged chronologically); squares, divided into 9 parts each, to represent distinct categories of historical events; and colors, to show different “Nations”.
A curious abstract visual system for reducing history to shapes and color on a standard, single field of two-dimensional representation.
The end product, while perhaps not becoming a real mnenomic device for learning history (or a compelling Visual Display of Quantitative Information), produced some intriguing designs.
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Lost in the Woods
Singular Sufferings of Two Friends, who had lost themselves in an American Forest, York, England, C.Croshaw, Coppergate, [c.1801]
A chapbook telling the tale of two travelers who become lost in upstate New York while searching for honey. This narrative, which ends thankfully with both men – and their plump canine companion – intact, is a pirated excerpt from St. John de Crevecoeur’s Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie et dans l’état de New-York (1801), and is put to use to illustrate to British readers the dangers, rather than the appeal, of the beckoning North American frontier.
Mementos
Pages from an album of drawings given to Robert Browning by André-Victor-Amédée, marquis de Ripert-Monclar, ca. 1830s-1860s, with later additions.
Past Times
Les Jeux des jeunes garçons représentés en 25 gravures à l’aqua-tints
d’après les dessins de Xavier Le Prince ; avec l’explication détaillée des règles de chaque jeu ; accompagnées de fables nouvelles par MM. Armand-Gouffé, Le Franc, etc. et suivis d’anecdotes relatives à chaque jeu.
(A Paris : Chez P.C. Lehuby, [n.d., after 1822?])
Noted as “sixieme edition” in the preface.
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Scenes of juvenile ludic life in France in the early part of the 19th century.
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The Jumble Club
The records of The Jumble Club, a group dedicated to playing whist (and *only* whist) which thrived in Glasgow, Scotland, approximately between 1799 and 1877.
The records consist of 4 ledgers containing minutes of meetings, with additional meeting minutes, inventories, insurance policy, checkbook. flyers and other related papers and ephemera.
And they came in a lovely metal coffer, complete with a set of keys, none of which fit the box lock.
Little Sunbeams
. . . and harried pets. [circa 1890, in the collection of the Beinecke Library
as part of a salesman’s sample book, including Young People’s History of the World. Possibly never published.]
Oratorical Gestures
Images of the Delsarte system of expression, popularized in the 1880s
and found in the volume: The Popular Entertainer and Self-Instructor in Elocution
(Chicago: Conkey, 1898) [in the collection of the Beinecke Library as part of a salesman’s sample book, including Wood’s Natural History for Children]
O, Temperance, O, Mores!
Young Gentlemen & Ladies Social & Temperance Society of Chester, CT.
A minute book of the organization, 1829-1841
complete with statement of purpose
And lists of members
However, if you fell off the wagon, your name was crossed out *and* you got the finger!
[Watch out for those Smith boys!]
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities 
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