From cookbooks to ghost towns: A great harvest of #FridayReads

This illustration appears in 1925's Standard Bible Story
 Readers, Book One, which I wrote about in
this November 2011 Papergreat post.

Here's another collection of interesting — and sometimes offbeat — reading material from around the web. There's more than enough great stuff here to get you through the upcoming weekend!

Also, quite unintentionally, ghost towns ended up being the theme of several of these links.

• Messy Nessy Chic: "The Time Capsule Ghost Town waiting to be brought Back to Life" (This is easily the most fascinating thing I've read in the past week.)
• Lizzy Young Bookseller: "Seven Milestones in the History of Cookbooks" and "Milestones in the History of Cookbooks, Take Two!"
• The Atlantic: "The Case Against High-School Sports" by Amanda Ripley
• David Hewson: "The curious story of Schalken the Painter"
• The Atlantic: "Meet the Family That Shuns Technologies Introduced After 1986" by Megan Garber
• Odd Things I've Seen: "High and Dry and Dearly Departed: The Ghost Town of Dana" by J.W. Ocker
• Strange Flowers: "The ghosts of Versailles" by James Conway
• Smithsonian.com: "The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary" by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie (Warning: Scary pictures)
• The New York Times: "In a Breathtaking First, NASA’s Voyager 1 Exits the Solar System" by Brooks Barnes
• Messy Nessy Chic: "10 Inspiring Bookshops around the World"
• Vice: "I Went to a Vibe-tastic Bookstore in the Middle of LA's Woods" by Chloe Cassidy
• Forgotten Bookmarks: "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" (which has inspired me to attempt to find old hobo symbols that might be scrawled on signs here in southcentral Pennsylvania)
• Capper's Farmer blogs: If you're interested in farming or rural lifestyles, you'll definitely want to check out the Capper's bloggers, who write about everything from canning to pickling to cooking to gardening. And I hear they might be adding a new blogger soon — one with much less of a green thumb.

Finally, here are a couple of outstanding links that consist only of images:

• Early American Commercial Pleasure & Public Grounds: "In Simpler Times - A few outdoor activities at public taverns in Europe during the 1600s"
• io9: "The Strangest and Most Tragic Ghost Towns from Around the World"