Ten Thousand Wonderful Things: Comprising Whatever Is Marvellous and Rare, Curious, Eccentric and Extraordinary in All Ages and Nations

Before the internet, there were books like this: a Victorian cabinet of curiosities compiled to make you gasp and say 'I had no idea.' Drawn from ages and nations, it gathers the strangest facts that history left behind: the cucking-stool and brank used to punish women, eccentric inventions from forgotten centuries, customs so bizarre they sound apocryphal but aren't. This is not a history book in any academic sense. It's a collection of wonders, assembled with the sole purpose of astonishment. The author understood that the past isn't just dates and wars and treaties it's also the moment someone invented an ancient washing tablet, or societies decided exactly how to humiliate wrongdoers in ways we can now barely imagine. It sparkles with the peculiar joy of knowing something useless and extraordinary. For readers who fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes, who collect odd facts, who believe history's strangest stories are its best.