Will-o'-the-Wisp Research

Today I ordered a century old copy of Notes and Queries from the city library, and the staff there were very helpful but had to defer the question to the Rare Book Department, whose normal staff were in a meeting, so I spoke to the contracted database staff, who were also very helpful. The upshot is that they'll contact me if they find the edition I'm looking for, and they're very hopeful that they will. The copy contains a query and a few notes about the Will-o'-the-wisp, carrying on from yesterday's research.

I also ordered Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature: A Catalog of Geophysical Anomalies from William R. Corliss, and got to speak to the man himself. I phoned the order number for the books and started speaking to the person on the other end about ordering the book, when I asked who I should write the cheque out to, whereupon he said "oh, you should write that out to me personally, William R. Corliss". So I spent the rest of the conversation sort of stumbling through and asking him about his work and just generally being in awe. Apparently he's up to 63 books now. We spoke about some of the old journals (he rather likes the "English Mechanic", which seems to be a favourite of Fort's too), the website, his newsletter and so on, and I got to tell him about the new research that I heard about from Dr. Mills yesterday.

I also ordered the book Night Orbs from long-time mysterylights mailing list member James Bunnell. Both of these books seem as though they'll contain a wealth of information—I've had a book review section of my Anomalous Lights site brewing for quite some time, so I could review both of these books therein.

As well as all that, I transcribed some more articles from The Times about the ignis fatuus and Will-with-the-wisp and Jack-o'lantern, and all the other things that they call it. There were only a few that I'd missed, but some had very valuable insights. Last night I'd transcribed a bit from Notes and Queries, as well as shifting about some of my previous transcriptions.

I also started work on compiling the huge table of Will-o'-the-wisp synonyms that I mention on my Will-o'-the-wisp page: "These ought to be cleaned up and made into a table, with citation information added as laboriously and pedantically as possible, but for the time being the unadorned list itself will have to suffice." I've colour coded it for language, and tried to group synonyms by indentation and so on. It has Googlecount information, and other such sidenotes, as well as careful source annotations, though it's a shame that the websites that use these synonyms don't themselves provide careful citations.