Want: A Rental House

I purchased my first home about two years ago, drunk on HGTV’s House Hunters and giddy with visions of the $8,000 tax credit available at the time. I have to say it’s a good thing I like the condo where I ended up, because my nerves are shot when it comes to house hunting: the only way I’m moving out is in a pine box.

It’s no wonder I feel this way. I had four different addresses in 2008, including my mother's house, where I spent a month living out of boxes and sharing a bed with a blanket-hogging basset hound. And then there was finding a place I could afford on the salary of a single, liberal-arts-degree-holding employee of a nonprofit organization, followed by the delights of convincing a banker to lend me a boatload of money to actually buy it. It’s a miracle I lived to tell the tale, quite frankly.

According to the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, housing stress is nothing new. “The choice of a house is in importance second only to the selection of a friend,” Youman wrote with his characteristic authority. And as is so often the case, much of his advice on the topic is just as practical today as was in 1872.

Pick a house in a nice neighborhood, but not one that’s trendy and expensive. Make sure everything works. Avoid lawsuit-happy slumlords. Really, what more information do we need than that?

Although the past few years may have been less fraught if we’d followed more of Youman’s advice, a few key issues have changed since his day. For example, Youman says that inclusive housing costs shouldn’t be higher than one-sixth of your total income, or about 17 percent; today’s personal-finance rule of thumb is that it’s okay to pay 30 percent of your income (or even more!) for housing.

There’s a good reason for this change in proportions: the extra money we spend on housing was already spoken for in our great-grandparents’ budgets. In the nineteenth century, it’s estimated that people spent up to 75 percent of their income just to eat. On the other hand, about 12 percent of the average American’s salary was spent on food in 1998, thanks to modern farming practices and transportation.

Having seen The Silence of the Lambs at an impressionable age, I can’t argue with Youman’s preference for living far away from a slaughterhouse or tannery. His advice wasn’t solely rooted in the ick factor, though: he clearly considered the right location a matter of good health. No matter what era you live in, there are certainly lots of reasons not to live near polluters like mills and chemical works. But Youman’s real concern is something even more fundamental.

The theory of germ-borne illness was just coming onto the world stage when the Dictionary was probably being written. Before it was universally accepted, sickness was blamed on miasma—foul smells and stagnant air, just the things you would find in mosquito-breeding mill dams and near overcrowded burial grounds, some of the very places this entry warns renters against. (For more on the changing understanding of illness, read Steven Johnson’s Ghost Map, a fascinating detective story about an 1854 cholera outbreak in London and the search for its cause.)

It turns out that the more things change, the more they really do stay the same. Fellow watchers of Selling New York, my second favorite real estate show, will realize that a close cousin of the miasma theory lives on even today in the form feng shui. On the show, a real estate agent frustrated by a property’s nasty reputation brought in a feng shui practitioner to spiff up the place before a potential showing.

Want: More Time

In the 140 years since the publication of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, America has changed a lot. We’ve gone from steam to oil to electricity, from snail mail to e-mail to text messages. But there’s one fundamental thing that hasn’t changed, and maybe never will—the day is just too short for accomplishing everything we want to do.

Youman began his venerable book by acknowledging that fact: “every hour, every minute has its money value.” Pitched as an “aid to the progressive hurrying spirit of the age,” the Dictionary isn’t so different from the Real Simple magazine that shows up in my mailbox each month. Youman gives tips for keeping the kettle clean (insert an oyster shell before use!); Real Simple gives tips for storing grocery bags for reuse (use an old tissue box!). The family resemblance between the two isn’t so hard to spot.

I could use a bit more time in my day, too, so I’ve decided to scale back on the publication schedule of this blog. While a new topic every day was a noble goal, it’s not really sustainable: A thoughtful post can take hours to prepare, and I’m not really interested in producing any other kind.

So for now, expect two entries a week—Monday and Friday. In the meanwhile, you could always do some extracurricular reading of the Dictionary on the slightly evil (yet completely addictive) Google Books.

Keep in mind, though, the lesson I learned the hard way after devouring an entire advent calendar’s worth of chocolate one December 1st. Savoring something is best done slowly—one bite at a time.

Want: Fewer Stones

Being a native of the Internet, common interests have inspired me to meet a number of people from around the country that I first knew online. It turned out that I didn’t fit their preconceived notions about residents of northern New England: I’ve never seen a live chicken up close, I don't have lift tickets hanging from my jacket’s zipper, and I'm not particularly emotional about maple syrup.

But even I can’t completely avoid a relationship with the land and its history, if only because it’s everywhere I look—often in the form of long-abandoned stone walls.

From beside the highway to the middle of the woods, they’re leftovers of New England’s agricultural past. Once upon a time, some farmer cleared those rocks from his pasture and used them to build a wall nearby. According to Robert Thorson, founder of the StoneWall Initiative, it was estimated in 1939 that there were more than 250,000 miles of stone walls in the northeast.

Based on the following entry in the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, some of those stones may have been moved with the help of clever Dr. Youman.

This technique dates all the way back to Hannibal’s trip to Rome—he had to get those pesky elephants over the Alps somehow—and it turns out that it’s use in even today. (Don’t try this at home, kids! Stones sometimes explode when exposed to temperature extremes.)

By the time the Dictionary of Every-day Wants was written, New Englanders had already been moving West for at least fifty years. The stone walls I see practically every day are ghosts they left behind, abandoned homes and farms reclaimed by Mother Nature. Thanks to that eager beaver, the landscape around here is pretty different: In 1850, 30 percent of Vermont was covered by forest. Today that number is closer 80 percent.

Guest Want: Less Bad Poetry

Ever-erudite contributing blogger LAW reports from the depths of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants:

When, at the end of his book, Youman turns to “Writing for the Press,” he gives a ten-point list for what, and what not, to do. As we’ve come to expect from him, he begins by exhorting writers to take responsibility—for their grammar, spelling, and facts. Curiously, his second point is a warning: “Do not write poetry.” Whyever not? His response is brutal: “Ninety-nine one hundredths of the rhyme written is good for three things”—to give to friends, to use for kindling, or for pulp at the paper mill.

What may seem like simple literary prejudice on Youman’s part is easier to understand if we see what he was up against in the literary world of his day. An easy, and highly amusing approach, is through the memorable anthology compiled by the brother-and-sister team of Kathryn and Ross Petras, published in 1997 by Vintage Books as Very Bad Poetry. Unlike most other such publications, the Petrases focused on poetry that was written in good faith, by people who believed themselves to be poets. As they note in their introduction, “A compulsion to write verse, and a happy delusion regarding talent—that is the beginning of a very bad poet.”

Among the worst poets in Youman’s day was one William McGonagall of Dundee, Scotland, who self-published more than 200 poems in his lifetime. The Petrases quote McGonagall’s own description of how he began:

“I seemed to feel as it were a strange kind of feeling stealing over me, and remained so for about five minutes. A flame … seemed to kindle up my entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry … It was so strong I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, ‘Write Write!’ So I said to myself, ruminating, let me see; what shall I write? then all at once a bright idea struck me.”

McGonagall was often inspired by current events of his day, such as the railway accident on the Tay River Bridge in 1879 (just a few years after Youman’s book appeared):

The Tay Bridge Disaster

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
’Twas about s
even o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”
…………….
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

 You can enjoy more of McGonagall’s memorably awful verse (which he referred to as his “poetic gems”) by visiting the website consecrated to him.

[Check back soon for more on Youman’s other 8 tips for aspiring writers. —Ed]

Want: Apple Slum(p)

The arrangement of Youman’s Dictionary of Every-day Wants is perhaps curiously genderless. In an era rife with books specifically for “ladies” and books specifically for “gentlemen,” the Dictionary intersperses without comment chapters devoted to traditionally masculine and feminine tasks—hunting with cooking and baking; farming with preserving food; carpentry with making clothes; and metalwork with washing, bleaching, and dyeing. Some specific chapters have even more all-encompassing appeal: the one devoted to toilet practices hops back and forth between freckle-bleaching methods for the ladies and whisker-growing techniques for the gentlemen.

It’s unclear just how Dr. Alexander Youman wrote with equal confidence about setting up a new beehive and finding the best homemade mascara, but he seems to have done so. Or was Mrs. Youman laboring quietly at his side?

As a lifelong New Englander I wish I could say I immediately spotted the potential typo in the title of today’s entry, but I’ve never heard of apple slum or apple slump. It seems to be a regional dish that’s still fairly common, a close (and tasty-looking) cousin to the buckles and crumbles that have become popular on the farmer’s market circuit around here. With the fluid nature of recipe titles over the years I’m not sure that we can call “slum” a error, but today this dish is definitively “apple slump.”

Youman’s recipe is painfully vague for cooks like me, who specialize in Kraft-based dishes. But for the day it was par for the course—standardized measurements and truly step-by-step recipes wouldn’t be common for another fourteen years, until the publication of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-school Cook Book.

It turns out that apple slump was a favorite of Louisa May Alcott’s family; a fancy calligraphy version of the recipe is even sold online and at the gift shop of Alcott’s Orchard House. A number of modern cooks have posted about their experiences with the recipe, which are fun to read—from the foodie to the traditional to the Rachel Ray (!).

Want: Harmless wallpaper

As someone who grew up in a house lousy with 70s-era wallpaper, I am amazed to realize that some people actually put the stuff in their homes on purpose. The little-drummer boy–themed print in my childhood bedroom may be at the root of any number of commitment issues—I know what it means to live with something for the long term, after all.

But A. E. Youman’s contemporaries had even better reasons to avoid wallpaper: it could kill them. According to Bill Bryson’s almost unspeakably wonderful 2010 book At Home, in the late nineteenth century 80 percent of English wallpapers contained arsenic. Although it had long been known (and used) as a poison, the element nonetheless turned up in green-hued wallpaper and paints, patent medicines, and face powders.

Symptoms of arsenic poisoning begin with headaches, disorientation, and drowsiness, and progress to diarrhea, vomiting, cramping muscles, hair loss, and stomach pain. From there, you run into the most well-known symptom of arsenic poisoning: death.

No wonder, then, that the Dictionary of Every-day Wants includes an entry on spotting this potential killer.

(click to enlarge)

All those constitutional trips to the countryside in Victorian novels are probably the direct result of environmental poisoning—if your wallpaper is making you sick, the best treatment probably really is a vacation. Bryson notes that Fredrick Law Olmstead, designer of New York’s Central Park, found his cure a bit more simply: he moved to the bedroom across the hall.

There was one bright side to an arsenic-scented boudoir, though: rooms with green wallpaper were rarely host to bedbugs.

Want: Un-funny Money

If memory serves, my sophomore American history class covered nothing more than a bunch of grown men bickering about how to back paper money. I’m sure other things came up, but that particular bit of history was so spectacularly, profoundly, mind-numbingly dull that it stands out even all these years later.

In the hands of our dear friend A. E. Youman, though, the finer points of early American currency take on a sense of immediacy. He got to the meat of the issue: Was it real, or was it fake?

In 1860, more than 8,000 American banks were issuing bills. (Everybody but the federal government was at it, it seems.) This made the Civil War era an excellent time to be a forger of paper money in America, if not a user of paper money. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, a third all paper money in circulation in 1865 was counterfeit.

Part of the problem was that each of these 8,000 banks designed its own bills, creating a wild diversity of styles and making it almost impossible to tell what was real. The Coin Site says, “The earliest notes are rather plain but as the need for anti-counterfeiting methods arose, talented artists were employed to create intricate vignettes that were difficult to duplicate. The vignettes are the most attractive to collectors since they show life during the period in which the notes were produced. There are hundreds of scenes, including those representing agriculture, industry and commerce and showing sailing ships, farms, antique trains, geography as well as allegorical representations of Faith, Hope, Justice, Liberty and Peace. The notes are often multi-colored and in high grade, are quite beautiful.”

This counterfeiting free-for-all supposedly ended with the passage of the National Bank Act in 1863—almost 10 years before Youman’s book hit shelves. (After this, banks were still licensed to print money, but the government controlled most of the bill’s design, making them harder to fake.) In 1865, the Secret Service was founded to further control forgery.

These efforts didn’t quite do the job, if we believe Youman. In this 1872(ish) entry, he warns readers not only to check the quality of the bill and its printing, but also to be sure it wasn’t issued by a broken bank—one that had gone belly up, apparently taking with it the currency it had printed. 

(P.S.: If I’d spent as much time on my American history homework as I did on this post, I’d probably be president by now.)