The Locked Cabinet
Every shelf of this collection holds a curiosity — but a few of Killikelly’s specimens are stranger than the rest, and they are kept here, in a cabinet of their own. Nine items, drawn from all three volumes; handle with care.
A Queen who Drank from a Cup Made of a Human Skull
Alboin, king of the Lombards, killed King Cunimund in single combat, married his daughter Rosamond by force — and had a wine-cup made of her father’s skull, from which he compelled her to drink. She had him assassinated in his sleep; the story ends with a shared cup of poison, drunk half and half.
Volume I · History & Royalty
“The Phantom Battle”
In February 1515, five soldiers of the Utrecht night watch saw two armies fight a full battle in the sky over the city — banners, artillery, cavalry, and streaks “as of blood” left behind. Their depositions were taken separately before the magistrates, and the vision was read as a prophecy of victory over Spain.
Volume III · War & Battle
Telling the Bees
In rural New England, when someone died, the family walked out and formally told the bees — and draped the hives in mourning — lest the swarms abandon their hives and seek a new home. Whittier set the custom in verse: “Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!”
Volume I · Customs & Social Life
A King “Envoulted”
Medieval assassination by doll: a little waxen image, baptized by a priest, then pierced with a needle where the heart should be. Robert of Artois had it done against Philip VI of France, who was terrified — and, the book notes drily, “lived for some years after the ceremony.”
Volume II · History & Royalty
Virgil as a Necromancer
To the Middle Ages, Rome’s greatest poet was a wizard: he founded Naples upon eggs, set a brazen fly on the gate that kept every other fly out of the city for eight years, and built statues that rang a bell whenever a province plotted rebellion.
Volume II · Literature & Poets
The Last Astrologer
Astrology died out of respectable England with William Lily (1602–1651) — but it left its fingerprints all over the language: a jovial man was born under Jupiter, a martial one under Mars, the saturnine and mercurial under their own planets.
Volume I · Science & Nature
The Church of the Lazy Saint
The smallest church in the world — twenty-five feet long, “about as high as a tall man,” twelve sittings — stood at St. Lawrence, Isle of Wight. Its patron earned the nickname “Lazy Lawrence” from his own martyrdom: roasted on a gridiron without complaint, he was pronounced by his executioner “too lazy to turn over.”
Volume II · Religion, Myth & Legend
A River of Ink
In Algeria two streams meet — one running with iron from ferruginous soil, the other with gallic acid from a peat swamp — and where they join, the chemistry is exactly that of ink. The result, the book insists, is “a river of genuine ink,” wanting only a Titan with a reed pen.
Volume I · Places & Wonders
The Lost Arts
Three things the ancients could make that 1900 could not: Tyrian purple, Damascus steel — blades that bent into hoops and sprang back — and malleable glass, demonstrated before the Emperor Tiberius by an adventurer who dashed a vase to the floor, dented it, and hammered it back into shape.
Volume II · Art, Music & Architecture