Wow, I found a neat example of James W. Zaharee's "miniature writing" last week! A single rice grain, centered and sealed on a business card, and dating back to 1936 (as apparently featured at the Three Expositions by Robert L. Ripley, believe it or not!), this grain is made out to Judy Goley, who appears to have lived just a hop, skip, and jump over the Mighty Mississippi from me in Dupo, IL! It's super tiny, but not as tiny as Zaharee was much more well known for. Quite the celebrity back in the day, Zaharee used a magnifying glass and crow-quill pens (with the points ground down to 1/24th the width of a human hair!) to write extremely small. He's probably most well known for writing 20,000 letters on the back of a postage stamp, which included the Gettysburg Address and the alphabet 30 times each! Believe it or not, again!
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I would also like to point out that the abbreviation of Illinois is IL, not ILL, so maybe this piece takes the World's Record for smallest typo ever... lol
"Wow!" Is the term that best describes this great item!
A persons name, town name and partial date handwritten on a grain of rice, it is and amazing item then and now.
Yet another amazing item in Karswell's Museum of the Magnificent, Majestic and the Macabre.
I can only wonder how many of these miniature items were created and then lost or misplaced. This is a true survivor of days gone by.
Thanks for sharing this unique item from the heyday of Ripley, the equal of PT Barnum of the twentieth century.
That is crazy neat. I love the lengths Victorians would go to distinguish themselves. Ripley's was certainly the TikTok of its day.
This is didactic, I know. But the official two-letter USPS abbreviations for US states and territories weren't in use before the development of zip codes in 1963. Prior to that, the post office asked letter writers to spell the state's name out. Beyond the postal service, local and non-official uses--like address plaques on buildings--just made up whatever they wanted to (and still do: I find all sorts of three and four-letter abbreviations in the crossword, for example, like N. Dak, or Ariz.). All that said, I can see why the people of Illinois might have frowned upon the official use of a three-letter abbreviation that made them all seem sick.
This takes me back to all the Ripley's books and general "strange facts" stuff I absorbed as a kid. I do remember all the "smallest writing" tasks.
Things are a bit different, nowadays. 5D memory can story 360 TB -- yes, terabytes, which is 360,000,000,000,000 bytes (!!!) on a single 12 cm disc.
You'd need a really good quill for that!
originally, most of the states had three letter abbreviations; between 50 and 60 years ago they were codified as two capital letters each. My grandma never stopped writing "Wis.," though.
Ok ok, I stand corrected lol
Ha. I have no idea why there are two periods though, so it's clearly still a typo.
And speaking of how we've upended centuries of hard-won typographical best practices by eliminating serifs in the internet age, I'm going with the pronunciation "Dupo the third" here.
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