View a recent day: June 10 | June 09 | June 08 | previous days | by month and year
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Treatise on rat-catching from 1898
Ike Matthews's "Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher After 25 Years' Experience" was originally published in 1898, but it still holds up, more than a century later, as an extraordinary example of just how lousy a job can be. Williams was a Manchester rat-catcher who spent a great deal of time ruminating on his trade, and in this slim volume he's jotted down all his many thoughts about catching and killing rats, from tricks with various oils as bait to whether tenants or landlords should have to pay for his services, to preventing one's sack of angry rats from bursting on a train, and so on. The section on training ferrets and treating their diseases alone is worth the price of admission.
Link
See also: Book pick: "Full Revelations of a Professional Rat Catcher" (1898)
Update: JP points out that Project Gutenberg has the full text of this online.
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
View a recent day: June 10, 2007 | June 09, 2007 | June 08, 2007 | June 07, 2007 | June 06, 2007 | June 05, 2007 | June 04, 2007 | previous days | all BB archives by month and year
