Robert writes:
While reading old newspapers online for a personal project I’m working on, I ran across this ad in the San Francisco Daily Alta (April 20, 1871). I’m posting it just because I love it:
Twenty performing birds and mice! Many incomprehensible things! And the world’s only Stylocarfe! You can’t see shows like that anymore. It would definitely be worth a dollar (and some of you would be eligible to get in for 50 cents).
That is really cool.
If you search “Louis Hazelmayer” on the Library of Congress website, there’s a picture of him playing his stylocarfe.
By George, there he is!
Looks a bit like Paul Baker, doesn’t he?
I love old ads like this. The Museum of Science has a few on display in their exhibit on how their museum and museums in general have changed since the 1830s (when the MOS’s predecessor organization was founded), there’s one for a sea serpent skeleton on display, one for a mammoth and one for some kind of weird fish called “the vampyre of the sea”.
Lamprey eel?
Maybe, the way they reprinted the poster, it was hard to read the small print, so I don’t really know any of the details of what the creature was supposed to be like.