Word: spinster
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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William Foyle still takes personal charge when one of his customers writes in for an especially exotic book. An elderly spinster recently asked for a book bound in human skin. Foyle sent out his scouts, within a week shipped her a copy of French Novelist Eugène Sue's Vignettes les Mystères de Paris, printed in 1843 and bound in skin from the shoulders of his Parisian mistress, as she had directed in her will. Price: $28. Says William Foyle: "It's an interesting business, bookselling...
...wealthy Chicago spinster named Kate Buckingham had two consuming interests: art and Alexander Hamilton. Regarding Hamilton as "one of the least appreciated of the great Americans," she decided to build him an eye-catching memorial. To this end she set aside $1,000,000 of the fortune her father, Ebenezer Buckingham, had made in banking and grain elevators. Before her death in 1937, Kate commissioned a heroic statue of Hamilton from Sculptor John Angel, and was considering as its setting a monumental eye catcher, designed by Finnish Architect Eliel Saarinen, with four 80-ft. fluted granite pillars topped by huge...
...people who have written books about Bernard Shaw, or ever will, God-fearing Tory Blanche Patch, spinster daughter of a Church of England clergyman, had the best chance to observe her subject. For the last 30 years of his life, she was his private secretary. What gives her book its own rare fascination is the fact that, as Secretary Patch puts it herself, she was never "swept away...
...Victorian squire's spinster daughter will continue to go to church. But "no Labor people will go. . . because going to church means you are Conservative. The bell-ringers may continue because of the pleasure of ringing and because they admire Winston Churchill. The schoolmistress will not go . . . because being semi-educated and class-conscious, she has 'theories' about religion and regards the parson as too dogmatic...
Into this world after 23 years away from it, bursts the spinster's girlhood beau-a selfish, tinny charmer (Fredric March) who dabbles at art and meddles in lives-with the rich wife who knows him for what he is and even puts up with all he isn't. He buzzes, jollies, flirts, cajoles, tipsily involves the French niece in a minor small-town scandal. Though baseless in itself, the scandal manages to shake up the other people into auditing their close-to-bankrupt lives...