Książ Castle, Lady Detectives, Library Reference Desk, a Visit to Bath & More: Endnotes 11 April

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

The fairytale castle above is Książ Castle, found in southwestern Poland on a rocky promontory overlooking the Pełcznica River. The first version of the castle was built between 1288 and 1292 and changed hands through the centuries. In 1509, it became the home of the von Hochberg family who ruled the castle until 1944 — when the Nazis confiscated the property. During WWII, the castle was SS headquarters, and an engineering team built a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the castle, the purpose of which is still unclear. Today, the castle is open to the public for tours, including many of its 400 rooms (!) and the underground complex. The castle website has all the info you need to visit during the day or night for special weekend adventures; watch a video if you dare. Part of the castle has been turned into a hotel with guest rooms and apartments — and an impressive breakfast spread. (European hotel breakfast is the best hotel breakfast.) Explore the photo gallery or enjoy a bird’s-eye view video of the castle and its surrounding countryside. Here are more stunning photos and details from Google Arts & Culture.

• How did the same person create 007 and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?! ‘Fleming had nine Bond novels under his belt and was convalescing after a heart attack in April 1961, when, forbidden a typewriter for fear of straining himself, he reimagined bedtime stories he’d told his son Caspar and penned Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by hand.’ (The original illustrations are darling.)

• Cool Course Alert: The Rosenbach is offering a 5-week online class about Victorian Female Detectives. ‘In this course, we will explore many of the most popular of these characters and interrogate how they reflected the spectrum of Victorian attitudes about women and how they both played into and resisted conventional Victorian conceptions of (and anxieties about) female ability, acumen, psychology, and labor.’ The syllabus includes a fantastic reading list!

• A few weeks ago on The Library of Lost Time, I talked about Emma Donoghue’s new book The Paris Express. She talked to The Irish Times about writing, Ireland, and working on a musical.

• Let professional nomad and Substacker Michael whisk you away to Bath, England, complete with commentary from Jane Austen herself.

• Five delicious words: Cake of the Year Competition. BRB, on my way to Budapest.

• How to Start Making Zines.

• Five Fascinating Literary Houses That Have Been Lost to History. ‘A stately home with connections to Jane Austen is to be bulldozed. Here are five properties linked to famous authors that no longer exist.’

• How well do you know iconic hotels around the world? I got 10/12.

• Feel like running away to sea? Here’s a reading list of Lives Lived at Sea and our podcast episode The Sea: Tales of Poets and Pirates. (It’s one of my favorites.)

• Sorta related: 5 Must-Visit Maritime Museums in Europe.

• The cutest women’s pajamas for every type of trip. I’d like the ones with the ostrich feather trim, please.

• I enjoyed this nostalgic look at roadside attractions like The World’s Largest Ball of Twine and Dinoland. I have fond memories of visiting the giant squirrel next to the pecan pie vending machine in Texas.

• 5 Houses That Look Like Optical Illusions. Sweden! Australia! France! What’s going on over there?!

• This essay about working in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library is irresistible. ‘Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.)’

Wishing you something wonderful that captures your imagination.

Top image courtesy of Kevin Perez Camacho/Unsplash.