Here's an old Scottish holiday card that was originally meant to be cut into squares so as to rearrange the heads, bodies, and legs. We put it through one of the many tools we use to create Abecedarian. Click the blue arrows to slide the rows back and forth.

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

unearths some literary gems.

From Margery Allingham's Sweet Danger:

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"Do you like American food? Scatty and I fixed her up an electric waffle iron. It works all right, but it's a bit big--the blacksmith made the actual grill--and you get waffles about a foot across. But I think that's all the better."

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"Who is Mr. Glencannon?"

"One of the prime busybodies of the world.... He's an old boy of independent means who spends his life writing to the newspapers. He must spend half his day reading them and the other half writing to them."

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[These two gems are in the mouth of a French hotelier...]

"... declared his room had been ransacked--how do you say?--rendered to bubble and squeak."

"If they are not, then my reputation, the reputation of my so beautiful hotel for courtesy, intelligence, and, as you would say, 'wise guyishness,' will be done, gone, exploded--pouf!--like a carnival balloon."

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Cowardice, and the letting down of friends, were the two cardinal sins in Mr. Randall's calendar.

"When you enter the country of Pain, they confiscate your passport.  You leave behind the things and people that used to feel important and familiar, in which you used to believe.  Everyone in the new country is a stranger, though it scarcely matters because pain is really a nation of islands, and everyone who lives there lives alone." —Gina Frangello, "Pain is a Country"

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

unearths some literary gems.

From Margery Allingham's Death of a Ghost:

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"I've told him that I'll outlive him if I have to die to do it."

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"He reminds me of my good grandmother: so covered with frills and furbelows that there's no telling where they leave off. As a child I wondered if they ever did, or if she was just purple bombazine all the way through."

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From Margery Allingham's Dancers in Mourning:

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They stayed to watch the curtain rise again on the Alexandra Palace scene, with the chorus in high boots and roller skates assisting Rosamund Bream and Dennis Fuller to enact a travestied version of the now famous "Leg-o'-Mutton Escapade" from Uncle William's memoirs.

During the garter business, that piece of inverted humour amusing to the audience only because it was funny to them that their fathers should have considered it funny, Sutane touched Campion's sleeve and they went backstage.