Notices by John Overholt (overholt@glammr.us)

Long manuscript is long. https://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990118126370203941/catalog

I tied a book to my belt, as was the style at the time (the 14th century). https://www.rosenbach.org/blog/reimagining-the-bat-book

This is a sheet of unused turnpike tickets from an 18th century English toll road. Something like this is so completely unremarkable in its time that it almost never survives, but in this case it was used as wastepaper to fill out a binding, and then recently discovered inside. #NewAcquisition

“You know what happened to the last man who crossed me? I ate him.”

Taking in the treasures of the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. I’m not saying I have a target on my back but I introduced myself to a bookseller and he said “Oh, I know who you are.”

I was able to pick up some cool stuff for the Houghton collection tonight, including a tiny fragment of a 17th century nun’s habit carefully preserved as a relic, a housekeeping manual for rural German wives, and a letter handwritten by the 18th century Mohawk chief Joseph Brant.

I’m turning 55 in a few months and I have decided that’s old enough that I can buy this hat without being that guy. I just want to keep my head warm and look put together, and I promise not to say “Llllladies…” at any point.

Reference question: could you please provide me with a list of all your uncataloged manuscripts?

Well here's the tricky thing about uncataloged materals...

Eager to drum up anti-Mamdani stories for his right-wing newspaper a (London) Times reporter interviewed a completely different Bill DeBlasio without confirming his identity. The Long Island wine importer used ChatGPT to script the answers he gave through his Ring Doorbell while away in Florida. I am not making this up. https://www.semafor.com/article/10/29/2025/british-newspaper-spoke-to-the-wrong-deblasio-not-an-imposter

The first constitution of the state of Massachusetts (1780) explicitly requires legislators to “cherish the interests of literature and the sciences.” It’s too bad that didn’t make it into the Federal one.

The Save Our Signs archive preserves 10,000 National Park Service signs at risk of government censorship for accurately describing American history. https://www.infodocket.com/2025/10/13/digital-collections-save-our-signs-archive-containing-over-10000-photos-of-national-park-service-nps-interpretive-materials-launches-online/

Everyone knows that President Washington's farewell address to the nation doesn't rhyme. What my book presupposes is, what if it did?

We know about MK-Ultra, the CIA’s spectacularly illegal and immoral experimental mind control project, because while the CIA director ordered all the records destroyed, he missed the ones classified as budgetary records rather than project records. Cataloging matters! https://specialcollections.princeton.edu/2025/10/the-cias-quest-for-mind-control-piecing-together-project-mk-ultra-and-its-princeton-connections-part-i-allen-w-dulles-class-of-1914/

Paul F. Tompkins gives dramatic readings of 1-star Amazon reviews of great works of literature. What really makes this is his exceptionally well-realized characterizations of the review writers. https://youtu.be/zG51SQhsraE

What the hell, Autocomplete?

Dr. Sophie Herzog was buried in 1925 at the age of 79 in a necklace made of the bullets she extracted from the bodies of Wild West gunslingers. https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2025/09/25/doctor-sophie-herzog-the-gunfighters-physician/

"Harvard School of Public Health Dean Andrea A. Baccarelli received at least $150,000 to testify against Tylenol’s manufacturer in 2023 — two years before he published research used by the Trump administration to link the drug to autism, a connection experts say is tenuous at best." https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/9/24/autism-dean-public-health/

I’m not sure what’s so funny about unsalted butter.

SOME PIG
https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:fhcl.hough:106468728?n=150

This delivery confirmation photo appears to have captured a glitch in the Matrix.