eBook Update: The School of Recreation

[jducoeur]

I haven't been posting many links to the Project Gutenberg site lately; I've been mainly keeping an eye out for particularly interesting books. Today I noticed one: The School of Recreation. It's a bit post-period (1696), but useful in enough fields to be worth a mention.

It's an overview of many different recreational topics. Of particular interest, it covers: Bowling and Tennis (both only briefly, I'd afraid); Riding and Racing; the Science of Defense (that is, fencing); and Ringing of the Bells (miraclaire, are you listening?). It also has sections on Military Discipline and a bunch of sections of Things You Do With Animals (Hunting, Hawking, Angling, etc). Neat little book, and worth checking out. My only real annoyance is that the frontispiece clearly shows a couple of people playing at billiards, but the book fails to actually deal with the topic; humph.

While I'm at it, my nominee for the latest Amusingly Useless Book: Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae, a 1638 grammar of Japanese -- written in Latin...

Comments

[miraclaire.livejournal.com]

It looks a lot like Fabian Stedman's Tintinnologia" (I think that's how it's spelled) which was the first book about change ringing (published in 1668). pretty cool

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, "Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae" will interest my father quite a bit as he devours Latin like a animal vorace. Thanks for the link.

- Eric