First you are shown a new hack to keep wine from spoiling. Then a dog lovingly devoted to its owner. Immediately in tow there are methods to repair broken glass and remove acne, a tip for weight loss, a cake recipe and an astrological reading of your future. But this is not your TikTok or Instagram feed – it’s the contents of a book written nearly four-and-a-half centuries ago.

The English writer Thomas Lupton’s book A Thousand Notable Things was first published in 1579. True to its title, it collected roughly 1,000 short passages ordered randomly, one after another. A seemingly endless stream of household “life hacks”, sensational stories and recipes, it offered answers for just about everything.

Trouble sleeping? Rub your forehead with a mix of white poppy and henbane seeds. If you find yourself bewitched, leave a mercury-filled quill under your pillow. And have you heard the folklore that claims when a robin red breast finds a dead human, they cover its face in moss?

Flitting through eclectic, attention-grabbing short-form content may be the de facto mode of media consumption in the 21st century. But how-to books like A Thousand Notable Things suggest that our ancestors’ preoccupations were not entirely different.

Lupton understood the wide appeal of such easily digestible material. In a revealing preface, he argued that imbibing many passages of “strangeness and variety” was preferable to being “fed too long with one food” by reading entire books.

It proved a winning formula. A Thousand Notable Things enjoyed at least 33 editions, remaining in print from the time Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe until 1827, the year the first known photograph was taken.

Its success belonged to a burgeoning taste for “books of secrets”, recipe-like instructional texts that taught everything from cosmetics and alchemy to brewing and beekeeping.

Originating in Italy, and published throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the most popular of these works were continually translated and reprinted throughout Europe. They are now recognised as exerting genuine influence on contemporary scientific culture.

Whether providing alchemical routes to the philosopher’s stone or the recipe for a nutritious stew, books like A Thousand Notable Things thrived on the promise of revealing hidden “secrets” about nature’s inner workings.

Of course, there was no guarantee that everything Lupton suggested would work: whether sleeping on your right side during pregnancy really meant the baby would be female, or that dreaming of eagles flying overhead was necessarily a sign of imminent good fortune. Sheer efficacy alone wasn’t the point. The appeal lay in the wonder, curiosity and amusement that accompanied practical instruction.

If some passages sound absurd or downright dangerous to modern ears (henbane and mercury are highly poisonous), consider that much of Lupton’s material was cutting-edge in its day. His most cited source was Antoine Mizauld, a Parisian medical professor and advisor to French queen Marguerite de Valois.

Even though the vitality of astrology, occult science and ancient medicine waned over the book’s 250-year lifespan, the deeply human concerns it addressed proved enduringly popular.

Personal copies

We know that contemporary readers found Lupton’s eclectic material engaging thanks to their annotations in personal copies, precious few of which remain today.

One survivor from 1612, now in the Glasgow University Library, is marked with small crosses at passages on lameness, heart trouble, ulcers, meat eating and stomach problems. We might speculate that its owner was managing symptoms of dietary issues or gout. So too are gout cures underlined in a copy owned by the 17th-century book collector Frances Wolfreston.

Another reader pencilled crosses next to 38 predominantly medical passages in their 1706 copy, including remedies for head and toothaches, burning eyes, shortness of breath, sore throat and insomnia.

Others were more selective. One copy in the Wellcome Collection is marked only occasionally, including at an anecdote about a German farmer who died with terrible pain in his side. A surgeon cut him open to find large pieces of wood and four steel knives, afflictions that were blamed on the Devil.

Just as we worry today about the pernicious effects of TikTok, 16th-century commentators also feared the “brain-rotting” potential of low-brow mass entertainment, distraction and information overload.

But Lupton’s take was more optimistic. Offering bite-size morsels gleaned from a wide range of texts, in plain English rather than scholarly Latin, gave ordinary readers access to knowledge that otherwise required whole libraries to attain.

These how to books, which are the subject of an ongoing research collaboration between Glasgow University and the Herzog August library in Germany, will take centre stage in an exhibition at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, from January to March 2027.

Whether or not they are direct antecedents of today’s instructional media, these texts encapsulate both the past’s profound strangeness, and those facets of human experience that seem perennial: the potent dialectic of similarity and difference that makes history so compelling. If nothing else, they might provide a handy hack to stave off your next headache.