This one is for the ladies. An edition of a rare 1694 manual, The Ladies’ Dictionary: being a General Entertainment for the Fair Sex, is going up for auction next month. Get your checkbooks out as it’s expected to fetch somewhere around $1500. It could be worth it though as it cautions to limit oneself to gentle exercise and be wary of being too thin. Of course it also suggests that to tame those particularly flabby areas, you should brew up a foul mixture of chicken and goose grease, pine, rosin, pitch and turpentine in an earthenware pot. Then mix it with wax, cool it, and apply it “to the place that Languishes, or does not equally Thrive”, and allow to set into a plaster. Yum yum!