The Friday Fillip: Slate’s Vault

Microsoft has done some good things. Even as an Apple fan boy I can say that. One such Good Thing is Slate magazine, founded in 1996 (and a strong influence in my naming of Slaw, as it happens) under the auspices of Microsoft’s MSN. In 2004 Slate passed into the hands of the Washington Post, under whose umbrella it still shelters today. But even a simple encomium to this news and popular culture magazine would be too . . . earnest, perhaps, for a Friday fillip. So it’s to Slate’s Vault that I want to point you today.

The Vault, styled as one of Slate’s blogs and curated by Rebecca Onion (no, not that Onion), is where the odd, the historical and the merely delightful come to be broadcast. These finds can range from the disturbing, such as a photocopy of a fraudulent 1893 broadside put out by something called the United States Ex-Slave Owners Registration Bureau, “Promising Compensation to Former Owners of Slaves,” to the hilarious 1912 stop-action film by Wladislaw Starewicz, a Polish photographer and entomologist, “The Cameraman’s Revenge.” (Entemologist, you say? Why, yes: the players are all artfully arranged insects.)

So when you have a moment — as now, for instance — nip on over and browse in the Vault. And there’s really no better, or indeed other, way to do that than by scrolling backwards through time. You’ll find clumps of related historical materials. Now, for instance, Ms. Onion is clearly mining a large find of US civil war period material. But there’s also G.B. Shaw’s “autoreply” postcard, sent to the many who wrote him about this and that; a note by Russel Banks made as he adjusted to these newfangled word processors; a tiny book produced by Charlotte Brontë, All About Arthur; and a brief exposition on How the Mango Became the Fruit of Mao.

Consider subscribing to the Vault’s RSS feed — you’d be looking at a mere one post a day — or, for those of you who never did get RSS, the Twitter account is @SlateVault.