Beginning in January 2021, I wrote a series of articles covering the birds in a single edition of an 1897 children’s magazine about our avian friends. The first bird that I covered from the issue was the nonpareil, also known as the painted bunting. To illustrate why the peerless bird was called the nonpariel, I pointed to the definition of the word in The Century Dictionary (1889-91), “having no equal, peerless.” I thought of my nonpariel bird article when I came across an ad for The Nonpariel Laundry Co. in the March 1923 issue of The Yale Literary Magazine. I clipped the ad from the HTML verson of the Ivy League publication on Project Gutenberg:
According to the ad, Yale students and faculty could benefit from the services of a a laundry without equal that would also repair clothes without extra charge. Talk about a deal. These days one may be lucky of the laundrymat is not the cause of clothes needing repair.
