Mail-packing section of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. shipping department, Chicago. The New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection.
• You, me, a bottle of wine, and a dismembered corpse: sixteenth-century romance in the Montpellier dissecting theater. (Smithsonian.com)
• A retailer known for disrupting traditional shopping by letting customers buy anything they can think of from the comfort of their own homes makes the risky decision to open its first brick-and-mortar store. The year? 1925. The retailer? Sears. (The Atlantic)
• “Like all other Americans with literature PhDs, I have had the old British monetary system explained to me a hundred times. But the thing is hopeless. Bobs, tanners, groats, florins, crowns, guineas—there’s quite a few too many of these. Also, there is the error of thinking the pound is the basic unit. Nothing costs a pound; everything costs a shilling.” (The Paris Review Daily)
• Preserved by a royal nanny and her family for the better part of a century, Queen Elizabeth II’s terrifying Mickey and Minnie Mouse dolls—along with some of her other toys and childhood clothes—are going up for auction. (Pictorial)
• For American soldiers in the Vietnam War, melancholy pop songs took the place of traditional military music. “There was silence in the field, but in the rear there was music everywhere. It was the same music that your non-soldier peers were listening to in America, so it was a shared soundtrack.” (Time)
• “The earliest recorded instance of a white wedding dress in Western culture is that of the English Princess Philippa at her wedding to the Scandinavian King Eric in 1406. She was dressed in a white tunic lined with ermine and squirrel fur.” (JSTOR Daily)