Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

Romans often took family names from agriculture, Cato

The Greeks and Romans also sometimes used metallic lead to write or draw on papyrus, which is the origin of the modern expression "lead pencil"—despite the fact that a modern pencil contains no lead.

Aldus Manutius denounced the Lyonnais printers and listed the many errors in their books, but the Lyonnais, rather than apologizing or denying the theft, simply used his denunciations to make corrections.

How much above zero still produces zero is not known.

all government work, including that stored in libraries, to be switched from parchment to paper.

Marine ecology is complex and tightly interwoven.

For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word sterling, which meant "of assured value." The

MORE THAN A gastronomic development, the salting of fowl and especially of fish was an important step in the development of economies.

The urge to draw is unique to humans

If I were ever to make an old-fashioned film noir—with a cynical plot full of intrigue, violence, and sudden twists, filmed on dark and menacing streets in misty black and white—I would shoot it in Havana.

Parchment and papyrus documents could be easily altered, but paper documents could not.

Gerrit Gerritszoon, who renamed himself Desiderius Erasmus.

In some parts of Sweden it was "a dream porridge," in others a pancake, that was made in silence and heavily salted. The custom was that the girl would eat this salty food and then go to sleep without drinking anything. As she slept, her future husband would come to her in a dream and give her water to quench her thirst. No data are available on the success rate of Swedish girls using this system to find a mate.

In modern times it has been found that oysters are rich in zinc, one of the building blocks of testosterone.

Melchior Lotther, originally from Leipzig, who printed Luther's Bible in both Low and High German on three printing presses working simultaneously. It was the first good translation of a Bible into spoken language.

The Romans made sauerkraut and were great cabbage enthusiasts. Cato suggested that women would live long, healthy lives if they washed their genitals in the urine of a cabbage eater. He was listened to on health matters, since in an age of short lives and high infant mortality he lived to be over eighty and claimed to have fathered twenty-eight sons, all of which he credited to eating cabbage with salt and vinegar.

Greek, a language in which everything is pronounced exactly as written

Flugschriften, or "quick writing.

brilliant Achilles, tall Hektor, gray-eyed Athene.

When the war finally ended, and Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee sat down to talk, Lee said that his men had not eaten in two days and asked Grant for food. According to some observers, when the Union supply wagons were pulled into sight, the defeated soldiers of the famished Army of Northern Virginia let out a cheer.

homes. Syracuse, chosen as the best route for canals, had been an undeveloped swampy lowland. Colonel William L. Stone, passing through in 1820 when the Syracuse population was 250 people, wrote, "It was so desolate it would make an owl weep to fly over it.

If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Our galaxy is called the Milky Way, and both it and the word "galaxy" have their origins in the Greek word for milk, gala.