Meet Mary Augusta Ward, the Colleen Hoover of her day. In 1903 and early 1904, her novel "Lady Rose's Daughter" was selling 1,000 copies a week (which would be good even now). www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/b...
Every year when my (grown) kids ask to go the the Blaze, a nighttime pumpkin spectacle in our town, I groan a little. And then every year I go, and it's amazing. (Yes, this is a sculpture made of intricately carved and lit pumpkins.)
We were not fans. "You may care for one detective story, but when there is a round dozen you may get a fit of indigestion. … Sherlock Holmes ... has a little too much of premeditation about him. You get a little weary of his perspicacity."
A vacation typewriter, just four inches high, was all the rage in 1921. "It travels with you, an intimate, personal friend, like your pet fishing rod or your golf clubs."
"Two little girls, Jean and Mary Lackey, 12 and 11 years old, went on a spree in Manhattan last night ... Packing extra clothing and two miniature turtles in a suitcase, they took a taxi across the Brooklyn Bridge, stopped at a pet shop on the Lower East Side to buy five kittens at 25 cents apiece."
I've got no shortage of great dog stories from the NYT archives, folks. Another one of my favorites: the Jan. 7, 1911 piece about the famous author Jack London attending the birthday party of a cosseted pup named Fluffy Ruffles.
But then "the truth came out" — it turned out that "whenever the dog saw a child playing on the edge of the stream, he promptly knocked it into the water," securing for himself another one of those juicy beefsteaks.
