Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

Two tourists in Pisa fled town believing they had pushed over the Leaning Tower. Coming home from a café in high spirits, one American shoved his friend against a building; the man glanced up at the tilting structure above him and cried "Great heavens! See what we're doing!" Both fled, and left by an early train, "not thinking it safe to stay over and see the famous leaning tower." Read it in the book →
A judge sentenced a burglar's arm to a year in prison — so its owner unscrewed it and left. The defense argued the accused had merely inserted his right arm through an open parlor window, and "my client's arm is not himself." The judge agreed logically — "I sentence the defendant's arm to one year's imprisonment. He can accompany it or not, as he chooses" — whereupon the man detached his cork arm, left it in the dock and walked out. Read it in the book →
Queen Victoria on meeting the great figures of the afterlife: "I will not meet David!". A lady of the court suggested that one satisfaction of the future life "would be the meeting with the notable figures of the past, such as Abraham, Isaac and King David." After a silence, "with perfect dignity and decision the great Queen made answer." Read it in the book →
Queen Liliuokalani told Victoria they were related: "My ancestors ate Captain Cook". Senator Depew told the Senate that the Hawaiian queen, received at Buckingham Palace during the jubilee, remarked that she had English blood in her veins. Victoria asked how so. Read it in the book →
A grandson of Queen Victoria sold her handwritten sermon on thrift for five pounds. Reproved in the Queen's own hand for extravagance and urged to practise economy, the spendthrift prince replied: "Dear Grandmama, thank you for your kind letter of advice. I have sold the same for five pounds." The book notes the reply "staggered her." Read it in the book →
At a wartime dinner in 1812, British and American officers toasted each other's leaders as drunk or dead. A British officer proposed "To President Madison, dead or alive!" An American came back with "To the Prince Regent, drunk or sober!" Read it in the book →
Charles II answered his own mocking epitaph by blaming his ministers. A courtier's verse ran that the king "never said a foolish thing, / And never did a wise one." The King replied: "That is very true, for my words are my own. My actions are my minister's." Read it in the book →
A herd of Kansas cows ate a candidate's prohibition pamphlets and went dry. The best prohibition story of the season, per the Adrian Times: a local candidate stored his temperance literature in the barn, "but accidentally left the door open and a herd of milch cows came in and ate all the pamphlets." Read it in the book →
There was a company that sold congressmen ready-made witty anecdotes to tell as their own. The book records a salesman calling on a new congressman on behalf of the "Statesmen's Anecdote Manufacturing Company": "I shall be delighted if you'll place an order for a dozen of real, live, snappy, humorous anecdotes as told by yourself, sir." Read it in the book →
Library patrons asked for "Dentist's Infirmary" and "Soap and Tables". A list of garbled requests that librarians nevertheless filled correctly includes Dentist's Infirmary for Dante's Inferno, Soap and Tables for Æsop's Fables, Pocketbook's Hill for Puck of Pook's Hill and Holy Smoke for Divine Fire. One cataloger's note on An Ideal Husband reads: "Essentially a work of fiction, and presumably written by a woman (unmarried)." Read it in the book →
A temperance deacon's secret bar was betrayed by the ice still solid in the pitcher. A carpenter removing the wainscot near a Boston deacon's fireplace found decanters, bottles, a pitcher and tumblers "cosily reposing in their snug quarters." The deacon blamed old Captain Bunce, who had left the premises thirty years before — until the workman mentioned the ice. Read it in the book →
Whistler arrived two hours late for dinner and scolded the guests for eating. He walked into the dining-room where the company was already seated and exclaimed: "How extraordinary! really, I should think you might have waited a bit—why, you're just like a lot of pigs with your eating!" Read it in the book →
A registry clerk offered Edmond Rostand of the French Academy the option of signing with a cross. Registering a friend's newborn, the dramatist gave his vocation as "Man of letters, and member of the French Academy." The officious clerk replied: "Very well, sir. You must sign your name. Can you write? If not, you may make a cross." Read it in the book →
Examination howlers of 1914: "The plural of spouse is spice". A collection of student answers offered to prove "there are some peaks of ignorance which he has yet to climb" includes "The law allowing only one wife is called monotony," "Bigamy is when a man tries to serve two masters," and "Wolsey saved his life by dying on the way from York to London." Read it in the book →
According to one schoolboy, Franklin "was also able to invent electricity". The same page of school-answer howlers reports that "Franklin's father was a tallow chandelier," that "wind is air in a hurry," that "shadows are rays of darkness," and that Queen Elizabeth "was tall and thin, but she was a stout protestant." Read it in the book →
A Princeton football Poe became a general in Honduras for sixty cents a day. Johnnie Poe, great-nephew of Edgar Allan Poe, quit when his "princely pay" translated into about sixty cents a day, and asked a U.S. warship for passage home with his fifty-four pieces of luggage. Challenged, he explained: "My fifty-four pieces consist of one pair of socks and a pack of playing cards." Read it in the book →
An English spinster watched Cleopatra writhe on stage and thought of the late Queen. Her verdict on the great actress's death scene: "How different from the home life of our late dear queen!" Read it in the book →
An old general told Kaiser Wilhelm that a young wife and a young Emperor together would finish him. Rebuked in the afternoon as "too young to resign," General Von Meerscheidt was advised that evening to marry a young woman to calm his excitable temperament. "Excuse me, your Majesty," he replied: "It would kill me to have both a young wife and a young Emperor." Read it in the book →
A young prince divided royal duty with his brother: "You go and sing God save your Grandmother". At a Quebec ball given for the two royalties, the future King George danced only with the young ladies and ignored the chaperons. Reprimanded by the Duke of Clarence, he answered: "There are two of us... while I dance with the girls." Read it in the book →
Harvard's Dean Briggs went "to yell with Hale". The book notes that nothing expresses Harvard sentiment in athletic season better than "the time-honored 'To hell with Yale!'" — which let Dean Briggs, walking to Soldiers' Field with Edward Everett Hale, answer the question of where he was going with a meaning smile. Read it in the book →
A university president's advice to visiting preachers: souls are saved in the first twenty-five minutes. Asked how long he might speak, a guest divine was told there was no limit — "but I may tell you that there is a tradition here that the most souls are saved during the first twenty-five minutes." Read it in the book →
The definition of tact: tell the horse a funny story before you put in the bit. The book offers this as the difference between the man with tact and the man without — the latter "would get an axe." American humor, it argues, is put to practical uses: "A collection of funny stories used to be an important part of a drummer's stock in trade." Read it in the book →
An editor's offer for a batch of bad jokes: "Ten yards start". H. C. Bunner, editing Puck, received would-be jokes with the query "What will you give me for these?" and wrote his "generous offer" beneath the question. Read it in the book →
A brakeman claimed he lost his finger pointing out scenery to tourists. After a lady tourist's "Gatling fire of questions" had mastered the geography of the route, she asked whether he had lost the finger coupling cars. "No, madam; I wore that finger off pointing out scenery to tourists." Read it in the book →
British Columbia land sharks sold fruit ranches on mountaintops. English and Scotch settlers were sold, at long range, ranches perched on peaks. A Kootenay Lake steamboat captain heard a splash and found a man swimming toward him who called: "this is the third time to-day that I've fallen off that bally old ranch of mine?" Read it in the book →
A demonstration of German efficiency ended with an axle missing from the American's own car. A tourist admired how a mechanic mended a broken ambulance axle in a jiffy — "No matter what breaks, there's always a stock at hand from which to supply the needed part." Then he called for his own car and couldn't use it. Read it in the book →
Four flies raided an adulterated pantry, and only the one that drank the poison lived. In a German allegory retold by pure-food expert Doctor Harvey Wiley, the sugar was full of white lead, the flour loaded with plaster of Paris and the syrup coloured with aniline dyes. The despairing fourth fly drank deeply of the fly-poison. Read it in the book →
A ticket clerk's answer to when the next train came and how long it stayed: "From two to two to two-two". The old lady's response: "Well, I declare! Be you the whistle?" Read it in the book →
The only ghost story the inventor of coal-tar dyes ever heard first-hand ended in self-inflicted gunfire. Sir William Henry Perkin's hero "Snooks" took a revolver of the latest American pattern to bed in the haunted chamber, saw a small white hand on the bedrail at two o'clock, and fired carefully. "From that night on he's limped." Read it in the book →
One educator wanted to deny teaching certificates to anyone who couldn't laugh at Charles Lamb. Samuel McChord Crothers said that were he on the examining board he would hand each candidate Lamb's essay on Schoolmasters, and "if the light of humorous appreciation failed to dawn as the reading progressed, the certificate would be withheld." Read it in the book →