October 21, 2011

All Hallows Reading at the Law Library

The nights are getting longer and Wisconsin is carpeted in whispering golden leaves. It must be time for All Hallows Read.

All Hallows Read encourages people to give spooky books on October 31st. We are getting in on this new tradition by highlighting some of our spookiest legal materials:

Universal Monsters: All Hallows Read Extras
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but vampire detective Nick Knight's Chocolate Pizza is best straight out of the oven. Make it yourself from the "Sweet Justice" chapter of The Cop Cookbook, then settle in to read something bone-chilling.

Our donated legal fiction collection, Prose and Cons, is full of mysterious ne'er-do-wells and insidious plots. Try Linda Farstein's Edgar Allen Poe inspired Entombed in which a decades-old skeleton is found behind a bricked up wall in a building once inhabited by Poe himself. Christopher Ransom's The Birthing House will keep you awake with his eerie story of a haunted house in rural Wisconsin.

For those who are reading this while doors mysteriously slam just down the hallway, these law review articles may prove invaluable:
  • If the House You Bought is Haunted - Ghostbusters May be Your Only Recourse, by Sharlene A. McEvoy. 21 Brief 21 (1991-1992)
From Humorous Phases of the Law (Albany Law Journal, Vol. 2, July 9, 1870 (July 9, 1870), pp. 1-3) comes a tale of landlord, tenant, and ghost:
"The question was, whether a tenant is justified in quitting a house and rescinding the contract of letting, on the ground that it is haunted by evil spirits. Jean La Tapy had hired a house at Bordeaux from Robert de Vigne, but after inhabiting it for a short time he found, like John Wesley, that he had evil spirits for his fellow-lodgers. They appeared sometimes in the shape of infants, sometimes in horrible forms, and terrified the inmates, displacing the furniture, rattling and making all kinds of uncouth noises in the rooms, and tumbling the family topsy-turvey out of their beds. This was not to be endured …"

Read these articles and search for more articles on zombies, ghosts, and mummies using the library's subscription to HeinOnline.

Universal Monsters: All Hallows Read Extras
Also on HeinOnline, find juicy primary historical materials, like:
  • "Famous Cock Lane Ghost"
    The Book of Remarkable Trials and Notorious Characters     (1871)
  • "Murder at Smutty Nose or the Crime of Louis Wagner"
    Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders (1927) 

Find the above historical books by entering the chapter name in quotes into the "Search all collections" box on the main page in HeinOnline. HeinOnline can be accessed from your dark, cobwebbed attic with a State Law Library card or from one of our mysterious portals - er, public-access computers - at our libraries in Madison and Milwaukee.


Spooky reading, everyone!
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