A good friend of mine shared a little book from 1941 (first print 1936) endearingly entitled
How to Know the Insects by
Harry Edwin Jaques (who obligingly specifies the pronunciation of his name with a phonetic spelling on the title page: "Ja' - kwis").
In addition to providing a handy introduction to entomology, this miniature masterpiece features a homely guide to the manufacture and use of what Jaques calls "killing bottles." For those collectors who, Jaques says, "fear the deadliness of cyanide," there are other more benign options available: "killing agents such as chloroform, ether, gasoline, benzine, and carbon tetrachloride."
The book's 140-odd pages are fairly evenly divided between quaint 1930s wisdom on collecting/mounting techniques and information on the insects themselves (it's full subtitle is:
An Illustrated Key to the More Common Families of Insects, With Suggestions for Collecting, Mounting and Studying Them). The whole is delightfully complemented with naturalistic line-drawings such as exhibit A at right: a
hexagenia limbata, or giant
mayfly.
Actually, the book (which is available
in full on the
Internet Archive if anyone's interested) is worth taking a look at just for the drawings, which I can't find credited. But it takes a true prodigy to produce something of this unparalleled sublimity:
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