A curated archive of the weird footnotes of the past, folklore that didn't make the textbooks, failures the winners chose not to mention, and the quiet, stubborn stories that refuse to be forgotten.
Fresh from the archive. Usually folklore, occasionally finance, always a little strange.
From Herodotus's distant rumors of the shape-shifting Neuri to the Inquisition's very Catholic panic, from Bedburg's theatrical trials to the twentieth-century B-movie, the werewolf has been, above all, a mirror. What people saw in it says more about them than about wolves.
Recent pieces, organized by the shelf they came from.
A curated collection: the Mothman Bridge, the bell-tower ghost of Wurzburg, the lake monsters of every mid-sized European country. Sorted by plausibility.
Most of the famous last words you have ever heard were polished after the fact. A real collection of verified final sentences, and how the myths usually diverged from them.
Not tragedies, not accidents, the large, deliberate, well-funded failures that somebody genuinely believed would work. There is, I'd argue, more to learn from these than from the successes.
The South Sea Bubble through the 2008 collapse. Not as Greek tragedy, not as Bloomberg post-mortem, but as archival records, with what's in the footnotes.
Kraken, Leviathan, the Irish merrows. A sober look at what sailors probably actually saw, and why the reports lasted longer than the fog.
From the Cottingley Fairies to the Piltdown Man. Why the smart people believed them, and what it tells us about our own age of plausible fabrications.
The Titanic is not on this list. These are the ones the news never really covered, or quietly stopped covering. Lives lost, lessons unrecovered.
There are roughly forty more pieces in the older stacks. New ones are filed most Fridays.
Odd Page History began as a folder on my desk at the library, a place I kept the kinds of historical anecdotes that were too strange for the research papers I was indexing, too small for anyone to write a book about, and too good to throw away. After about a year, the folder had a hundred and forty entries in it, and I realized it wanted to be a catalog.
The odd page of the title is a literal reference: in old manuscript conventions, the oddly-numbered pages, the rectos, the right-hand pages, are where the important text goes. The even pages, the versos, are where the footnotes and marginalia live. This journal is, in that sense, written for the versos. The footnotes. The stories that ran off the edge of the main page.
Every entry here started in a primary source somewhere, a chronicle, a court record, a dusty newspaper on microfilm. None of it is made up. A lot of it is still very, very strange.
With cataloging care,
— E. Thorne
Most Fridays, one email: a new piece, a curiosity from the week's reading, a recommendation from another journal. No ads. No tracking. Just the catalog, by email.