Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach now has a couple of difficult days as he leaves his old university and says goodbye to a particularly fine cohort of students. Here is some more manuscript nonsense to keep him and you distracted. Is this urban legend? Probably but pleasing. A celebrated authoress wrote a drama, which she committed to the manager […]

Harry Freedman, The Murderous History of Bible Translations: how to get yourself killed in the middle ages

Some years before Bach was born, Beach pater left a manuscript for his first book on a tube train. Of course, back then, if you lost a manuscript it was over. Photocopies were practically unheard of and expensive and computers were but a gleam in Turing’s eye. The manuscript was happily retrieved some hours later, […]

Robert Bringhurst, Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface: we need a good general history of fonts, italics and typefaces…. Go Garamond!

Recently Chris, from Haunted Ohio Books, wrote a fascinating post on a missing folklore manuscript. Chris reached out to see whether anyone could find this precious document, a series of fairy legends from the Appalachian Mountains collected by Marie Campbell (1907-1980).* The legends were referred to in 1976 by Katharine Briggs in her Dictionary of […]

40 below zero…

When Beach was in his early twenties he used to spend hours, and they were happy times, looking through detailed archaeological graphics of Anglo-Saxon and Roman cemeteries. At one point he used to take them to bed and fall asleep with Winchester A or Circencester 1982 Season open on his chest. There is something, well, […]

British paras in Lower Saxony: the end of the iron dream

Beach has to satisfy himself with a very short post today, not because he doesn’t have time but because he has not the slightest idea how to deal with the material at hand. Great consternation, says the Bedford Times [unable to get the original], has prevailed amongst certain classes at Luton, from rumour that the […]

Lauren Bacall was so stunningly beautiful…

This is the kind of tragic little story that is worth absorbing, because it shows how certain superstitions survived deep into the nineteenth century in the UK and the strange mélange of learned with popular superstition. Let us start with Sarah Evelyn Walker, 24 and a governess, daughter of a farmer from Everdon (Northamptonshire) the […]

It’s not just Vietcong in the jungles of ‘Nam. Photo dated 1967.

Beach has previously given examples of bosom serpents, the idea that animals, particularly snakes can live within the human body. But consider the following freaky description. What is this thing? The quotation comes from the Athenian Oracle (II, 380) where reader’s questions were answered. Whence proceeds the Shutterkin? Physicians have imputed this Shutterkin (which resembles […]

A British newspaper story from 1870, enjoyed the flying mortar board: go Anglicans, go!

Lebensborn is a Nazi word to place side by side with such Teutonic charmers as Einsatzgruppen, Lebensraum and Endlösung. The Lebensborn or Life’s Fount was a scheme to breed a hundred million blond supermen and their hand maidens. It had various reflexes: sex between consenting Aryans was encouraged, against conventional Christian morality; Aryan women siring children […]