The library of Case Western Reserve University has put online “full-text, complete page images of books from the regular circulating collection that have become too fragile or brittle to allow normal circulation.” The wood s lot entry on this wonderful find leads off with a link to A Concise Dictionary of Middle English by Mayhew and Skeat (1888), which is an excellent thing to have available. My eye was drawn to Street Names of Cleveland by Walter August Peters, with a copy of Spafford’s “Original plan of the town and village of Cleveland, Ohio, October 1, 1796,” and Syrian Home Life by “Rev. Henry Harris Jessup, D.D. of Beirut, Syria,” published in 1874, with chapters on The House, The Dress, The Food, The Priests (headings “Ignorance.—Vice.—The Ordained Cameleer…”), The Druzes, The Nusairiyeh, The Christians, The Civil War (Lebanon had been through a particularly vicious religious war in 1860), etc. (The term “Syria” then encompassed what is now Lebanon.) But your taste may run to Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! (1886) or Umbrellas and Their History (c. 1871). There should be something here for everyone.
Update (July 2019). The original links no longer work; I’ve replaced the “online” link with an archived one from which you can get to the various mentioned texts.
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