Notes:
Letterers for interior sequences are listed as a group on page below indicia: Bob Lappan, Kurt Hathaway, Dan Burr, Roxanne Starr, and Joe Boyle.
One of the seventeen Paradox Press series of Big Books:
1994 - The Big Book of Urban Legends
1995 - The Big Book of Death; The Big Book of Weirdos; The Big Book of Conspiracies;
1996 - The Big Book of Freaks; The Big Book of Little Criminals; The Big Book of Hoaxes; The Big Book of Thugs
1997 - The Big Book of Losers; The Big Book of The Unexplained; The Big Book of Martyrs; The Big Book of Scandal
1998 - The Big Book of Bad; The Big Book of the Weird Wild West
1999 - The Big Book of Vice; The Big Book of Grimm
2000 - The Big Book of the '70s
First Line:
In 1850, shortly after the discovery of gold in California, a law was passed prohibiting persons of Mexican descent from prospecting in the gold-rich area called the Mother Lode.
Foreword, Introduction, Preface, Afterword
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Credits
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Subject Matter
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We often think today's horrifying headlines detailing unspeakable acts against human beings are a consequence of our excessively permissive, perhaps even amoral society,E
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Introduction to Chapter Two: Killers and Cannibals.
First Line:
It was an unavoidable western recipe: mix equal parts hard men and harder conditions; roast over the motivating fires of starvation and desperation; season with a dash of vengeance or sociopathy...
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Ill-equipped to face the rigors of westward emigration and ill-starred in nearly every other way, they were forced to violate one of civilization's oldest taboos.
Foreword, Introduction, Preface, Afterword
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Credits
Letterer(s):
typeset
Subject Matter
First Line:
Just to let you know the Weird Wild West wasn't composed entirely of cutthroats and killers, this chapter seeks to achieve a balance by offering up a handful of the West's more colorful characters.
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Introduction to Chapter Three: Kooks and Characters.
First Line:
Of all the yarn-spinners who popularized the wild west in the fiction of the late 19th century, no one was more influential than Edward Z. C. Judson, a.k.a. Ned Buntline, king of the "dime novelists"...
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Manifest Destiny--the god-given right of Americans to seize the west from undeserving lessers--drove many an adventurer into feverish schemes of conquest.
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Long before white men conquered the west, the legend of the Thunderbird reigned among Indian tribes of the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest.
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For more than half a century, San Francisco's freewheeling, freebooting barbary coast district beckoned sailors, miners, city-slickers and cowpokes to come taste its bawdy charms.
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In early August of 1863, Hill Beachy, a businessman with interests in hotels and the local stagecoach in Lewiston, Idaho territory, had a horrifying dream.