We post the interesting and kooky things we find while looking for the answers to reference questions.
I was especially tickled by the entry on mattresses in the furniture section of I Love it When You Talk Retro. It seems that before the insides of mattresses were monitored by any sort of law, many new owners would wake up itching. I suppose that this is why the phrase “Don’t let the bedbug bite” first appeared. States started to require that a list of mattress contents be attached to new mattresses. This solved the original problem and opened a whole new can of bedbugs. It seems that the warnings against removing the content labels were so dire that the mattress-buying public was afraid to do so. A whole generation of mattress label hilarity was born.