<div>We live in the era of catchy headlines and click-bait online features?but we’re not the first generation to enjoy news that is strange or lurid. As Rona Levin shows in <I>Comic, Curious and Quirky News Stories from Centuries Past</i>, oddity and intrigue have been a part of newspapers since their very earliest days.<BR> <BR> Collecting some of the most fascinating and bizarre stories from English newspapers from 1700 to 1900, Levin offers up gossip, true crime, scandal, and more. We encounter a drunken cart driver careening through Victorian London while hauling a ton of gunpowder?and matches; sit in on the first meeting of the ?No-Nose Club”, a support group for syphilitics; get a gruesome glimpse of the autopsy of the Empress Maria Theresa, whose body is discovered to be full of ?a great quantity of fat and viscous matter, Her Majesty having accustomed herself never to spit.”<BR> <BR> The variety of stories is astonishing, their contents often horrifying?but just like their original audiences, readers today will be unable to turn away.</DIV>