Blog Post

Land "Improvement" in the Industrious 1800s

This post is about one of the prints available from Vintage Visualizations, a new Brainery-affiliated venture. For more info, check out our intro post here!

"Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." That's what Theodore Roosevelt said about the Grand Canyon in 1903. But "improving" a piece of land can mean a lot of different things. In the case of this Industries chart from...

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Fingernails blog
Blog Post

Fingernails: Great Auspices of Personality

If ever you thought, hey, I wonder what my fingernails say about me, then oh boy, is this the place for you.

There's a whole bunch of superstition about fingernails and how you could read into them (much like reading the lines of a palm), but the most comprehensive and awesome database I found was from this book: Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astonishing Facts and Useful Information, published in 1889. That's a serious title for a book, but it...

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