I've been discovering some of the thousands of books--wonderful, hilarious and etc, etc--available free online or for download from Project Gutenberg [www.gutenberg.org]. Amongst them is a little 1922 book by Henry Stanton giving advice for parents. It includes such gems as these: (for parents of boys) "The use of alcohol, coffee and tea by children tends to weaken their sexual organs." In the same book, when discussing the bringing up of girls, he advises us: "Girls who have formed vicious habits are apt to indulge in the practice of self-abuse at night when going to bed. If there is cause for suspicion, the bedclothes should be quickly and suddenly thrown off under some pretense. " This instruction would really be a wow in our day and age ;-).
I discovered too a truly bad but compulsively readable western about a 'hero' called 'Wild West' (I kid you not) whose sole object in life seems to be to provoke 'bad men' so that he can show them how good he is with a gun; a story about a spaceman who fell in love with an alien kind of octopus; and the usual assortment of boys' adventure stories set in Africa or some other 'wild and exotic' locale. PG is a wonderful resource and I'm still investigating...
No comments:
Post a Comment