Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
MODERN information technology is a great boon – although Feedback sometimes suspects that its main function is settling pub arguments.
We recently mentioned an extremely bored afternoon whiled away reading the UK Post Office Guide, back when it was an inch-thick paper publication (6 July). We had idly wondered why it was against the rules to post "quinine coloured pink" to India.
A colleague who read the column quickly fired back an explanation, garnered by the simple expedient of asking a famous web search engine to look for occurrences of "quinine coloured pink" and "India" in the 17 million books and journals it has scanned.
Thus we now know from a snippet of an article in a 1907 edition of the Pharmaceutical Journal that: "Some years since it was decided by the ...
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