Dr. Tilghman Answorth Howard Lowe, the person who first started writing NEQUA, died in Topeka, Kansas on January  3, 1894. That is six or seven years before the book he is credited with writing was actually published and placed on sale to the public. NEQUA was supposed to be serialized in a publication, a "magazine" by the same name as the book. Only four issues of that "magazine" were published. The third issue was actually a double issue which in addition to a chapter of NEQUA it reported on the Co-Operative Congress which was held in Topeka on April 9-11, 1896.

It would be three years, in April of 1899 before Equity Newspaper would be started which restarted the serialization of Dr. Lowe's book. Finally in 1900 the book is placed on sale.

Somewhere I found a notation which listed Mastoiditis as the cause of death. I have lost the citation which mentioned Mastoiditis as contributing to Dr. Lowe's demise.  

Seeing that was a real shock for me. I had been reading another manuscript that had come into my hands. That manuscript resulted in my  taking a look at the personal history  of one of my distant relatives.  A distant relatives who committed suicide, died as a result of the constant pain which increased to a level where his answer to life was death. What really drove this home in my brain was the fact that this distant relative was a preacher, a very well respected pastor. One of those guys who remind us that we do not have any reason to decide to take another persons life and that it is totally forbidden to escape by ending our own.  His constant pain which drove him to suicide was caused by  Mastoiditis.

So finding Mastoiditis as contributing to Dr. T. A. H. Lowe demise pushed me into a real funk. In today's world we have no idea what Mastoiditis is or what the symptoms are like  and no comprehension of what was or wasn’t the treatment in 1900. I don’t think we have any idea of what a simple diagnosis  like that inferred to people of  one hundred years ago.  The prognosis was a down hill slide into insanity and suicide.

One hundred years ago, Mastoiditis, before all of the esoteric pain killers and pain blockers were available  which we rely on today was probably considered a death sentence. People could not stand the constant pain, the attempts to reduce the inflammation were minimal and very few recovered. 

Dr. Tilghman Answorth Howard Lowe was buried in Topeka in an unmarked grave .

I have been  invited to a BOOK FAIR.  So this past two weeks I have been getting ready.  I have searched online for “Book Fairs and Book Festivals”. Since I am such a bibliophile you would think that I would have been to a book fair at least once in my life. The closest thing to a Book Fair that I have attended was an Antiquarian Book sale in Sacramento California. It was real interesting. There were tables with thousands of dollars of rare books. There were booths that only sold Science Fiction and Adventure books and one guy sold “Ephemera”. My computer dictionary defines ephemera as :

items of collectible memorabilia, typically written or printed

ones, that were originally expected to have only short-term

  usefulness or popularity.

The gentleman in Sacramento had pamphlets or paper advertisements from political parties, churches, carnivals, whack-o’s of every description. Cheap printings offering opinions on U.F.O.’s communism, marijuana, medical cures. I spent a lot of time looking. The prices were outrageous.

So that antiquarian sale is what I am using in my mind as a reminder of what a Book Fair may actually be like. The instructions I received from the organizers of the Book Fair say that I will share a table with another person. That translates into an area, three foot by 30 inches. They will provide a chair. So, to simplify things I have done two 8 x17 posters that give people walking by a little bit of an idea about the contents of the book. 

My Internet search for other Book Fairs turned up some amazing information.  Iowa City, Denver Colorado, Paris France, even found the UFO convention in Eureka Springs Arkansas. So I need to look at the possibilities and potentialities, and make some decisions based on potential sales, not on where I would like to go for a little vacation.

Book Fairs sound like a new adventure. Hope they are not as boring as wholesale trade fairs.