Book link purge

Annie T. Benthall's painting of Dawlish Warren in
Eden Phillpotts' 1920 A West Country Pilgrimage.

I tend to accumulate bookmarks to far more Internet Archive books than I can write about. Time for a bookmark purge; they may be of interest to others.

• An Epworth league's second trip to Europe (Noel R Hamer, 1904) - an American Methodist's travelogue of a European visit.
• A visit to the Isle of Wight by two wights (John Bridge, 1884) - witty account (if occasionally laboured in its puns) of two gentlemen's week in the Isle of Wight.
• A West Country Pilgrimage (Eden Philpotts, 1920) - vignettes of Devon and Cornwall locations, rather naively illustrated by Annie T Benthall.
• An account of the nature and medicinal virtues of the principal mineral waters of Great Britain and Ireland, and those most in repute on the continent : to which are prefixed, Directions for impregnating water with fixed air ... extracted from Dr. Priestley's Experiments on air (John Elliot, Joseph Priestley, 1781) - on mineral waters, and Priestley's experiments in making soda water.
• Birket Foster, R. W. S. (HM Cundall, 1906) - a good biography of a lesser-known watercolourist, whose work included a series on the watering places of England (see Tall-quay).
• Devonshire Fiction - interesting checklist of Devon authors and titles "compiled by H Tapley-Soper, City Librarian, Exeter", in the 1910-1912 compilation of the London Devonian Year Book.
• Folly for the wise (Carolyn Wells, 1904) - quite often pleasant (e.g. the strange hybrid animals) nonsense verse from the prolific American author, poet and humorist. The Internet Archive has a large selection of her many other works.
• Frost Flowers on the Windows: a new, truly great discovery (Albert Alberg,1899) - a very strange short monograph expounding its author's theory that the leaf-like patterns of frost on windows are formed by the astral ghosts of dead plants.
• Original Glossaries. 23. Isle of Wight Words (WW Skeat, 1881) - dialect glossary.
• Teaching English usage (Robert C Pooley, 1946) -  interesting perspective from 50+ years ago from a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. Refreshingly for his era, Pooley takes a strongly evidence-based approach to many prescriptive shibboleths, such as the downer on "get"; the use of superlative for one of two items; the use of "whose" for inanimate objects; use of "either"/"neither" for more than two items; the usage of "can" vs "may"; and so on.
• The Blackmore country (FJ Snell, 1906) - nice illustrated account of the Devon of RD Blackmore.
• The Monks of Thelema (Walter Besant, James Rice,1878) - social satire involving the creation of a Utopian feudal society in an English village.
• The panorama of Torquay, a descriptive and historical sketch of the district comprised between the Dart and Teign (Octavian Blewitt, 1832) - self-explanatory.
• When All Men Starve: Showing how England Hazarded Her Naval Supremacy, and the Horrors which Followed the Interruption of Her Food Supply (Charles Gleig, 1897) - a late-Victorian apocalyptic warning.
• When it was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy (Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull aka Guy Thorne, 1904) - distinctly anti-Semitic apocalyptic imagining of the mayhem when a Jewish villain masterminds a scheme to undermine Christianity by faking archaeological evidence that Christ never rose from the dead.

- Ray