If you think that people’s hobbies are getting weirder, think again.  Modern hobbies are tame compared to some of the things people  Selectgot overgot round togot up togot by  in the past.  Here are just a few.

These days, everyone knows how to  Selecttinkertwinklemeddlepotter   with photographs to make them look different from real life.  Trick photography goes back many years before the days of Photoshop. Back in the late 1800s, when photography was in its  Selectimmaturityinfancychildhoodbirth , people used to enjoy posing with their families in headless photographs.  Otherwise serious family portraits would feature a typical family in their best Sunday clothes, except that the father would be  Selectcontrollingwieldingexertingoperating  an axe, mother would be headless and a child would be holding mama’s head  Selectaboveafieldaloftahead .  The effect was achieved by layering the images of different photo negatives on top of each other.  Judging by the sheer number of such pictures out there, it was a pretty common  Selecttendencycultdeedfad  a century or so ago.

Another favourite family day out in nineteenth century Paris was a visit to the city morgue.  A glass-walled, refrigerated room was set up a short walk from the Cathedral of Notre Dame originally so that the public could identify the bodies of the dead.  However, it became a huge  Selecteventattraction themecharm with as many as 40,000 visitors per day – similar to the numbers who visit Disney World today. The morgue was  Selectestablisheddrawnfeaturedcharacterised in all the Paris guide books, and was popular for nearly 50 years until it eventually closed in 1907.

All in all, the today’s free-time pursuits seem positively tame compared to those of our ancestors!