I’m always on the lookout for paracosmic material about others’ imaginary worlds, and I just stumbled across an article on Slate concerning the elaborate world created by Elmer, Arthur, and Walter Nelson, who grew up on a farm in Goshen, New Hampshire. During the 1890s, they created copious amounts of paracosmic material, including newspapers, magazines, maps, illustrations, and [my favorite] seed catalogs. The Amherst College Special Collections has digitized all the related ephemera, which can be seen online.

Actually, though, the best introduction to the Nelson brothers’ world is a Web site, The Worlds and Works of the Nelson Brothers, created in spring, 2014, by a group of Amherst students who studied the works for a course. This site provides context about the family, town, and times, as well as summaries and transcripts of selected ephemera. Fascinating, even though I’m not really interested in all the martial details that constitute much of the paracosm.