The joy of research

[julesjones]

Writing is intermittent at the moment (because of Stuff that's higher on the priority list for the next few weeks, not because of failure to write). Nevertheless I did 2000 words on Sunday, in the course of which I discovered that Google is not good for everything. I have a fairy who has been abducted by Bad Guys, and it occurred to me that they'd probably use a mix of modern pharmaceuticals and old herbal lore when they stick a syringe full of tranquillizer into him. My memory refused to cough up specifics of herbal lore relating to controlling fairies, and the books I might have skimmed through are mostly in storage. Alas, my Google-fu failed me, and I couldn't think of search terms that didn't result in hundreds of results in the class "twee modern nonsense" and no serious folklore research.

I think I'll have to go and hit the mythology section in BookBuyers this afternoon. And if that fails me, I'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, and go to a library...

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Does this (Amazon link) sound like the right book? It's got the right name, and is rather long (304 pages) and about the right publication date (1987). (There seem to be a number of different editions of it listed on Amazon, actually.)

There's also what looks like a slightly updated version here (Abebooks), from 1994, though that may just be a typo on the year.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

That's the bunny. I love that book and if I don't unpack it then I am buying another copy.

[brooksmoses]

By way of noting this for the record: julesjones and I went by Bookbuyers to see if they had a copy, and while they didn't, they did have M. Grieve's A Modern Herbal, Vol I. (A-H) and Vol. II (I-Z) in Dover reprint, which seems to be roughly the same sort of thing except three times the size and from 1931 (so thus missing the modern medicine, but including a reasonable bit from what was current at the time). It also looked quite interesting.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I probably do want this particular book. Partly because it's more up to date, mainly because it's searchable by english name or latin name, has photographs or clear drawings of each plant and has a full botanic glossary, how to grow the plant, geographic distribution, medical uses, contraindications and the history, myths and legends, for a very, very large number of species of plant.

If those books have all that, then perhaps?

[brooksmoses]

This one definitely doesn't have the drawings for everything (it had only a few, and all black-and-white), and not so much on the how-to-grow and the contraindications so far as I saw.

(I also didn't mean to be implying that you should necessarily get it instead of the other one; it'd probably be more useful as a supplement. Partly I was just posting this was as a record of the title and stuff for Julia's benefit since she had been very tempted by it, but I tagged it on your comment so you'd see it too.)

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Sorry, I'm migrainous as all get out tonight, so I might have been snippy when I wasn't honestly intending to be.