The eight minute video, A Fox Tale, is something to be seen.  Four French students have animated this Japaneses legend to stunning effect.  I am usually not much  of an animation fan, but this is worth a visit.

Signet had a wonderful series of book covers for its Signet Classics Series done in the 1960s.  This shows the cover of George Orwell’s Burmese Days.  The cover is by the often-neglected Canadian illustrator James Hill.

The notebook I have been featuring this week was also used to record expenditures and some income.  As I looked through it, a number of interesting items caught my eye.  One of the most striking was the expenditure that has been highlighted in the red box.

This recorded that on the 30th of November, 1901, my Great Uncle Vernon Arnold paid Henry Baker $165 for his work for a year.  Henry must have been the “hired man” because according to family tradition, “Uncle Vern” more or less kept a farm.  That is, although he had a farm he wasn’t much of a farmer or businessman. At some later point, perhaps during the depression, he was in danger of losing the farm because of back taxes.  So that  Great Aunt Rio would have a home, her sister and husband bought the farm and  allowed Vern and his wife to stay there. 

In that same year, an expenditure of $10.00 is recorded on the 17th of December as “Given to Rio.”  Was that the “Christmas money?”

This is the inside cover and first page of the Pierce booklet.  In some of the later text it is claimed that cures can be effected without a visit.  Probably the more accurate statement states that the cost of all money orders had been increased by two cents as a “war tax” for the Spanish-American war.  That statement is in the lower left-hand side of the image.