Best Of MetaFilter

Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943)

Amazing post! Flagged as phantasmic*: Wobbuffet kicks off spooky season with a fabulous, deep, bookworm-friendly post on weird tales from the 18th Century.

18th century school workbook doodle via The Museum of English Rural Life

I think what I like best is that it reminds me of my own school maths book, except my handwriting was rubbish and the doodles were of my scruffy Jack Russell rather than sporty rabbit chasing dogs.

Richard Beale was my great great great grandfather ... It's been very weird to see my ancestor's doodles going viral: Mefi's own intensitymultiply on encountering the MERL's popular twitter thread about an 18th century teen's mathematics workbook

Okay, so I said I'd tell the full story of the perennially misbehaving student from the 18th-century. Here it is!

Catseye presents a provocative potboiler about a puckish pupil from the past.

17th Century commonplace book via themillions.com

Before Jezebel, The Toast, and Twitter there were wise and witty women handily perpetrating "epic feminist takedowns of the ages," as illustrated in yarntheory's interesting post about Mary Collier and her 18th century poem, "The Woman's Labour"

... and before Pinterest and Evernote and Tumblr, "there was the humble commonplace book, a space for gathering and reflecting on ideas, quotations, observations, lines from poems, and other information." MonkeyToes gives us a loving magpie's roundup of this "venerable tradition of idea curation."