Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” identifies the real villain — First published in 1868 and never out of print, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is easily one of the most widely-read novels in American history. …

It’s Friday the 13th, which means a Jason Voorhees marathon is running somewhere on cable tonight. It also means a whole lot of people are worried that today is their unlucky day. Like that Friday the 13th in third grade when I was taking a spelling test and a spider…

(Belief in the supernatural not required.) — “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Robert Louis Stevenson’s dreams, which he referred to as his “unseen collaborators.” Mary Shelley’s disturbing nightmare about a re-animated corpse led to her masterpiece “Frankenstein.” Modern bestselling authors like Stephen King, Colson Whitehead, and Stephenie…

I lost my best friend to addiction, but I’ll never stop wondering if she’s okay — Note: The names in this piece have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved. The first time I saw her, we were in seventh grade. She was the new kid at school, and she stood up in chorus class and challenged another student to fight her. While smiling…

A History of Commonplacing — Way back in the olden days of the late 20th century, I did one of the only things an angsty bookish girl could do (aside from reading a lot of Dickinson. Or distributing riot grrl zines): I kept scrapbooks. But not the kind that involved holiday-themed borders from Michaels. Mine…

Our perception of an historically all-white Europe is utterly false. In 2012, while researching the historical novel I’m working on, I came across Imtiaz Habib’s book, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677. …

The Invention of the Medieval Girdle Book You are a Renaissance scholar with places to go and people to see. But you need your hands free, and your cumbersome text won’t fit into your belt pouch. What to do? It’s early evening. Night is about to fall, so it is…

If you’ve ever had your fortune read with tarot, you owe the experience to Marie-Anne Lenormand, an 18th and 19th century French cartomancer who popularized the art of card divination. “She remembers,” writes one who was much in communication with her between the years 1811 and 1813, “having a singular…

Chained Library in Hereford, England It may seem counterintuitive to us, but books were not always shelved to show the spine. “The earliest books in the Library had their shelf‐marks written on their fore‐edges. These volumes were shelved with their fore-edges, rather than their spines, facing outwards, with the shelf‐mark…