This week's mail included this pair of books offering insight into life in the American Wild West of the 19th Century.
My immersion into that historical period doesn't just include films, comics and novels, but also the reality of Frontier life.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in The Wild West - From 1840-1900, by Candy Moulton, is a modern, encyclopaedic, text book broken down into thematic chapters, from clothing and accessories to medicine, travel, communication and crime.
While Western Words - A Dictionary of The Old West, by folklorist Ramon F Adams, is a reprint of a 1944 book, that does exactly what it says on the tin. It's an alphabetical catalogue of words used in the "Old West" with attendant explanations.
Please, don't for one minute, think that I'm secretly writing a Western novel of my own (or even another film script). I'm woefully uneducated in the verisimilitude of that arena, but eventually I would love to learn more.
Okay, I did see these books recommended in a Facebook group for writers of Western fiction, but I only joined that to pick up on recommendations just like these... as well as interesting new and old genre novels.
As it stands, I just love the type of minutiae that are the bread and butter of this kind of reference book.
Maybe, one day, something from one of these two books will sneak into a roleplaying game I run for the Tuesday Knights, or even a write-up of a future game of Dead Man's Hand.
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