Batgrl: Bookish Hooha

Remember this article? It was linked around quite a bit:

100 Actual Titles of Real Eighteenth-Century Novels, The Toast, Aug 6, 2014

And understandably - there are some really funny titles in there.

Someone on my dashboard yesterday had actually discovered a couple of reviews for a few of these books. It's driving me crazy because I now can't re-find that post - I do wish we could search the dash!  Silly me, of course I can look up posts I liked in my Timeline! So I can credit Julia/Bambbles Rambles for this:

Book Reviews of Yore - Whimsical Breeches and Matrimonial Incontinence

She did choose one of the books I'd have had to peek into (you know, if I'd seen the book's title as it sat on a shelf): The Adventures Of An Irish Smock, Interspersed With Whimsical Anecdotes Of A Nankeen Pair Of Breeches. You can never tell with a name like that - the only humor might be in the title.

Anyway, I sort of assumed that none of these other books were to be found online and then went about rummaging around for other books. And then I read the list again, snickered a bit here and there (again), and googled. And found three volumes of this:

The Charms Of Dandyism; Or Living In Style. By Olivia Moreland, Chief Of The Female Dandies. (1819)

Via Google Books:

The Charms of Dandyism, Volume 1

The Charms of Dandyism, Volume 2

The Charms of Dandyism, Volume 3

Note: I do not claim this is either good or funny - I haven't looked at more than 3 pages. I do see that it is loooong. But free is free. I'll poke around in it a bit more later.

I'm also now curious about Olivia Moreland's coauthor, listed as Thomas Ashe. If these are all his books listed here, then this might be him in wikipedia?

If any of you pick it (or multiple volumes) up and read more? Do let me know how it goes? I have SO many found ebooks of this sort that I've picked up with the thought "might be so bad it's good, maybe?" that I then forget to get back to and actually read.

I really need to start a re-occurring title for this kind of post, along the lines of Free Ebooks I've Bumped Into That I Might Read, Or Maybe Not. Just to keep passing this sort of thing along.