🦇 1 🦇

I've been looking for ways to better earn the name Brom Bones Books, and I came upon this interesting video -- featuring the very interesting historian of cookery, Jonathan Townsend. It inspires me to get back into baking.

By the way, ginger cakes also appear in Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853). The scriveners, who spend their days copying legal documents, send out the office's twelve-year-old assistant to bring back snacks. Melville writes:

Also, they sent Ginger Nut very frequently for that peculiar cake—small, flat, round, and very spicy—after which he had been named by them. Of a cold morning when business was but dull, Turkey would gobble up scores of these cakes, as if they were mere wafers—indeed they sell them at therate of six or eight for a penny—the scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the crisp particles in his mouth. Of all the fiery afternoon blunders and flurried rashnesses of Turkey, was his once moistening a ginger-cake between his lips, and clapping it on to a mortgage for a seal.

🕷 2 🕷

Ever hear of a writer named Edgar Allan Poe? He's not very well known, which explains why a lot people misspell his name Edgar ALLEN Poe. Or do they do that simply to irritate stuffy know-it-alls like me? Anyway, here's the third episode of Tales Told when the windows rattle, spotlighting my dramatic reading of Poe's "The Facts of M. Valdemar's Case."

🎃 3 🎃

Kansas Public Radio produces a great show called The Retro Cocktail Hour. It's actually two hours long, and it's described as "the home of space age pop and incredibly strange music." Every year, this program has a Halloween special, and you'll be amazed at how much spooky, silly music Darrell Brogdon, the host, has collected over the years. This music is perfect for a festive, costumed gathering -- or for a solitary walk through a fogbound graveyard.

🦉 4 🦉

Daniel Cooke, a writer and voice actor, invited other voice actors and anyone else who follows him on Twitter to record and send him lines from "The Raven," by Edgar Allan Poe. I helped! Dan then stitched them all together to create this international reading:

At "press time," this reading is still being edited. I'll post a link as soon as I get one to the finished product.

Maybe one or two of these will make your Halloween a bit more historical, literary, musical, and/or poetic!

-- Tim