Louis Pope Gratacap was the curator of mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History from 1880 until his death in 1917. He usually read during his three-hour round trip to the museum from Staten Island. He also wrote novels, and one of them, The New Northland (1915), may be the earliest novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex. — Read the rest

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The ComicBooks.com Reading Room is a free online library of old comics that you read in your browser, one deep-zoomable page at a time. Open Culture pointed to it this week. The counter on the front page listed 20,109 books. The site promises "No login, no paywall, no catch." — Read the rest

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A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there.
Robert Testard painted it for Charles d'Angoulême, a count in southwestern France, as one of 56 miniatures in Les secretz de l'histoire naturelle.  — Read the rest

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Charles le Brun (1619–90) drew a set of human heads that match the heads of animals: an ox, a fox, an eagle, a raven, a parrot, and a pig. Louis XIV put him in charge of the decoration of Versailles in 1669, and the palace pictures needed crowds of figures a viewer could tell apart at a glance. — Read the rest

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F. D. C. Willard was a Siamese cat named Chester, who lived from 1968 to 1982. In 1975, his owner, the physicist Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University, wrote a paper on low-temperature physics and used the word "we" throughout, according to Wikipedia. — Read the rest

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Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 Dutch natural history book. — Read the rest

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1999 A.D. is a short film the appliance maker Philco-Ford made in 1967 to show what family life would look like at the end of the century. It opens with a boy named Jamie, who builds a sandcastle version of his family's house on a Southern California beach. — Read the rest

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Luke Howard was an industrial chemist in London. He studied clouds as a hobby in the early 1800s. In his Essay on the Modification of Clouds, he gave the standard cloud formations the names we still use today. Cirrus is the Latin word for a wisp of hair, cumulus for "convex or conical heaps," stratus for a "horizontal sheet." — Read the rest

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"From The 'London Times' in 1904" is an 1898 Mark Twain short story set six years in the future, and it describes something very close to the internet. It opens as a murder mystery. Clayton, a hot-tempered army officer, is accused of killing Szczepanik, the inventor of a machine called the telelectroscope. — Read the rest

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De Acupunctura is a 1683 book by the Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne, and it came out of one of the most roundabout translation jobs on record. Ten Rhijne was living at Dejima, the artificial island off Nagasaki that was the only piece of Japan open to Europeans during the Edo period. — Read the rest

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The Florence Y'all Water Tower stands beside Interstate 75 in Florence, Kentucky, and it says "Y'all" because of a paperwork problem. When it went up in 1974 it read FLORENCE MALL. The developers had given the city the land for the tower on the condition that the mall's name be painted where interstate drivers would see it, and the mall itself was still two years from opening. — Read the rest

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Georg Danek and Stefan Hagel have worked out a way to sing Homer, and Open Culture has their recording. Danek teaches at the University of Vienna and Hagel is at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. What they recorded is lines 267 to 366 of book 8 of the Odyssey, the passage where the bard Demodocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite. — Read the rest

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If you were moving diamonds across the Deccan Plateau in the 1830s, there were rules about when to set out. Leave on a Tuesday or a Thursday, on the 5th, 13th, or 28th day of the lunar month. Eat coriander seeds before a Tuesday departure and jaggery before a Thursday one. — Read the rest

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A gongoozler is someone who stands beside a canal and watches the boats. According to Wikipedia, the word may have begun as canal workers' slang for a person loitering on the towpath, and The Times has described it as meaning "someone who hung around bridges to laugh at the inept efforts of less experienced barge folk as they struggled to pass through locks." — Read the rest

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In the year 937, Mount Fuji erupted and sent the Ken-Marubi lava flow down its northern slopes and over a stand of fallen trees. The lava hardened around the trunks while the wood inside burned away, leaving long hollow tubes in the ground. — Read the rest

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The Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression is an acting manual, first published in 1885, that set out to chart every movement a human body can make. Genevieve Stebbins, an American actress, wrote it after training under Steele MacKaye, who had studied in Paris with François Delsarte, a French singer and orator who died in 1871 without publishing his method. — Read the rest

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Polyphonic music has two or more melodic lines running at the same time, and the earliest known written example is a short piece in praise of Saint Boniface, composed around the year 900. Giovanni Varelli found it in 2014, when he was a PhD student at St John's College, Cambridge. — Read the rest

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Manuel Bravo makes video tours of ancient places, and his "Virtual Rome" reconstructs the city as it stood in the second century AD, when its buildings were at their height. The camera flies over the rooftops, moving the way drone footage does, so the views are ones no Roman ever had. — Read the rest

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The BraunSammlung is a museum of Braun's industrial design in Kronberg im Taunus, up one flight in a building Atlas Obscura describes as a German strip mall. Braun's headquarters is around the corner, and a nonprofit association runs the museum in collaboration with the company. — Read the rest

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The Tower of Baa-Goat is a 31-foot brick tower in Windsor, Illinois, with a ramp spiraling up the outside of it, and goats live in it. Dave and Marcia Johnson built it in the late 1990s, Marcia told the Atlas Obscura podcast, after Dave saw a photograph of the goat tower at South Africa's Fairview winery in a British wine magazine. — Read the rest

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