The best reason to reopen an old book is the thing you can't believe is in it. These are the entries that made us stop and read them aloud to whoever was nearby.
Wodiska's 1909 book records the birthstone list before the jewelers' associations rewrote it in 1912: April sapphire, June agate, August sardonyx. Our Birthstone Finder shows what your month meant before the committee.
The Life List turns Doubleday's 1904 library into a working field checklist: every bird, moth, mushroom and mammal in the set, tickable as you find them in the wild.
Name That Creature deals you an original plate and four species from the same volume. Eight rounds of identification, using the very pictures a 1904 naturalist would have carried.
Frederic Lucas's Animals of the Past shows what science first imagined the great fossils looked like. Some reconstructions hold up; some are magnificent errors — both are worth the visit.
Spot the Fake is built from Wodiska's own chapters on imitation stones: doublets, pastes and 'scientific' gems, and the tests a working jeweler used before certificates existed.