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Welcome to the special place in my mind where Godey's Ladies' Book meets the J. Geils Band.

Ever wonder where the phrase "fashion plate" comes from? In the mid-nineteenth century magazines like Godey's began including "plates" or pictures of the hottest fashions. Get your corset gussied up tight, ladies, because they are showing some bare elbows in Paree.

The advent of print media technology that made such plates cheap enough to reproduce (not to mention postal service that made magazine delivery more feasible) contributed to a new era of female consumerism. These plates were so treasured that women would sometimes save them and hang them as wall art (think of it as the Christie Brinkley poster thumbtacked to the teen bedroom running that J Geils soundtrack).

Women of the emerging American middle class--aspiring to be Victorian "angels in the house"--could now be told how to dress, and how to comport themselves, with charming regularity. An exciting new era, even if that baby does look a little Edward Gorey-esque. At least the young girl approaching it is armed with a saber. I'm sure everything will turn out just peachy, aren't you?

President's Day Factoid: if the main character of your novel were about to look Abraham Lincoln in the eye, how would you know what color those eyes were?

Right after the Confederate capital of Richmond fell to the Union army, President Lincoln came to see the captured city. He visited the Confederate White House, which Jefferson Davis had fled, and even sat in Davis' office chair. You *know* I was not going to miss a chance to stage a scene in which Mary Bowser meets the man with whom she'd allied herself as a Union spy.

And thanks to a detail obtained for me by a very helpful gentleman from the Lincoln Presidential Library, Mary looks the Great Emancipator right in the grays of his peepers to congratulate him on the victory.

When it comes to historical fiction, the devil is in the details.

Fear of a red tractor. That is what keeps a novelist up at night.

Remember the good ol' days when barber, surgeon, and dentist was a single occupation?

Okay, maybe those days weren't so good. But these days, everyone's a literary critic. Including Dr. Miller, who's also my dentist.

Last year, he told me about a book he'd been reading. A book he really liked. Until he got to a description of a field wherein there sat "a red John Deere tractor." He immediately put the book down, never to finish it. Because, as he put it, "everyone knows, John Deere has never made a red tractor. That was put in there by some New York editor."

Only an Oregon dentist can make New York editor sound like such an unseemly villain.

But Dr. Miller was onto something. Writers are always trying to add specificity to our descriptions, to make things more real. Except that when you get that *real* detail wrong, you have blown it big time.

As it happens, one of my New York editors, the lovely Laurie Chittenden, is originally from Virginia. She suggested that the bird's nest I'd tucked into a magnolia tree on the very first page of my novel should have gone into a dogwood, because that's the state tree of Virginia.

Now, I'm an obsessed lunatic. I'd already checked on whether magnolias grew in Richmond. But here was a bona fide Virginian making the case for dogwood. So what did I do? I emailed one of the Virginia state arborists, just to make sure that a bird would actually nest in a dogwood if it were in the exact location of the tree on page 1 of my novel. Only when he said yes did I make the change.

As you can imagine, this level of obsession takes an awful lot out of a novelist. I was reading the galleys of my book last fall, and lo and behold, I realized I'd made a reference to a straight razor. You know, the olde timey open-bladed razor that any nineteenth-century character would be familiar with. And so I took my big purple pencil (the red pen of galley proofing) and Xed it out.

Why?

Because nobody called a straight razor a straight razor, until after there were safety razors (that olde timey kind everyone's dad used). Until then, they were just razors.

I swear, sometimes writing historical fiction is like pulling teeth. Just joking, Dr. Miller!

The nineteenth-century was a period of amazing innovation. In facial hair.

Indeed, the less-than-Civil War obsessed individual may not realize that sideburns were named for Union General Ambrose Burnside. But as this quiz from the fine folks at Smithsonian.com makes clear, when it came to fantastic facial hair configurations, Burnside had stiff competition.


Another fascinating fact. Especially for *The Secrets of Mary Bowser* in which a certain handsome barber figures prominently.

Tomorrow: razors! tractors! and my dentist!

Forget the cheesesteak. In antebellum Philadelphia, it was all about the pepperpot.

Given the popularity of yesterday's rat 'n' squirrel bake-off, I thought it would only be fair to discuss the culinary obsessions of the North. Or at least of Philadelphia, where about half my novel is set.

So if you were feeling peckish in the City of Brotherly Love circa 1851, you just needed to prick up your ears for the cry, "Pepperpot, smoking hot." That meant the pepperpot vendor--always an African American woman, in the depictions I've seen--was plying her signature dish. For Portlanders, think of it as being like a food cart, but without all that bulky cart business. For the rest of you, think drive-through without all that internal combustion engine.


What was in pepperpot? A lot of meat, usually tripe, oxfeet, whatever else was cheap, and then a lot of spice.

And yes, Mary does try pepperpot when she arrives in Philadelphia. Does she like it? Let's just say regional cuisine can take some getting used to.