Fancy Dresses Described

Fancy Dresses DescribedThe Victorians adored fancy dress parties: what better way to escape the rigidity of social conventions than to spend a festive evening disguised as Cleopatra, a Swiss milkmaid, or Alice in Wonderland? Well to do party goers of the era consulted Fancy Dresses Described, an elaborate guide to hundreds of glorious costumes. The book was so popular that it was updated several times; this is the sixth and final edition, originally published in 1896. Time

Set amid the salon society of fin-de-siècle Paris

His painstakingly prepared images were remarkable revelations of nature's diversity in uniformity: no two snowflakes are exactly alike

Strauss has prepared the commentary for this edition with references to major catalogs

"we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth

Isaac Newton

as it sometimes is in other 'modern' textbooks

books on prince hamlets

books on observatories

the explanatory text is rich with sidelights from literature and legend

Into a countryside dotted with log cabins and occasional Greek Revival mansions

compound stops of the organ

and thrills