Before Christmas I had never heard of Félix Fénéon, but then I received a book.

As you will have guessed from the accents, Fénéon was French. He was a literary critic, magazine editor and an anarchist of sorts around the turn of the 20th century. Being an anarchist cost him his job in the French war office.

Then he found a job at Le Matin, the Paris daily, where he worked for several months in 1906. His job was to write diverse little items, filling a column or so every day.

They were more than fillers. They were tiny stories in their own right.

The book I received has a collection of more than 1,000 of these stories. The title, "Novels in Three Lines," describes it exactly.

An example: "On the doorstep of the rectory in Suippes, Marne, a harmless box nevertheless caused excitement on account of its lit fuse and its wires."

There you have the essence of the story. What more do you need to know?

Here's another: "Mme. Céline Larue, 43, whose apartment is on the fifth floor, on Chaussée du Pont in Boulogne, fell out the window. Dead."

Sad, of course. But again, all you need to know.

And one more: "Pauline Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a hatpin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, a dishwasher of Chatou, who had underestimated her."

There was trouble with cyclists, even in France a century ago: "An unidentified cyclist knocked over, in Fourqueux, wheelwright Garnier, 58, who sustained severe injuries to the head."

And so it goes, for page after page of happenings including domestic violence, hangings, corpses being fished out of rivers, and other distressing items - and labor trouble too:

"The director of the streetcar lines in Brest, 63 times guilty of neglecting workers' breaks, will pay 63 fines of one franc."

As the translator, Luc Sante, says in the foreword, taken together the items present a full view of life in France - and Europe assuming France was more or less typical of the continent - eight years before the First World War.

Fénéon's "faits divers" reminded me a little of Misfits, the column of reports, opinions and other snippets that appeared in the Albany Daily Democrat about the same time as the Frenchman was scribbling away in Paris.

Misfits was the work of Fred P. Nutting, variously the co-owner, publisher and editor of the Albany Daily Democrat from 1892 until 1912.

Nutting kept the column going for a while after his retirement. On July 9, 1913, he observed:

"Bud Anderson's pugilistic ambitions have been completely jerked out by a N.Y. dentist, who is some fighter… Before the fight both Medford and Vancouver claimed Bud Anderson exclusively. Now Medford refers to him as the Vancouver lad."

Maybe what we need in the paper today is more brevity of that sort.

When he's not reading his Christmas books, Hering can be reached at (541) 812-6097. You can also check out his weekday morning video, D-H Today, at democratherald.com.