Monday, October 31, 2016

The Seaside Sybil: Now Available!




The Seaside Sybil is a strange little work. Written in 1882 and almost entirely New York-centric in style, it proposes a rather simple oracle system; 100 possible fortunes are present, and the numbers 1 through 100 placed on slips of paper and one drawn at random to consult the oracle.

The oracle itself is what concerns, of course, the occult audience- also of interest here though is the addition of ads for quack medicine, often ads of a rather outmoded and at times hilariously bigoted nature; for example, an ad featuring a "chinaman" charicature eating a box of rat poison- the ad states "They must go!" It is not clear if the rats, or the chinaman, are the primary subject.

28 pages.

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