Here's Cupid as a quick-change artist, from Bachelor Ballads and Other Lazy Lyrics by Harry Spurr, 1899.

"Mesmerized skull," from Illustrated Descriptive Price-List of Magical Apparatus and Illusions, 1884.

These are pages purloined from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.  (See the very strange history of this book here.)

We're honored that the renowned philosopher of magic Robert E. Neale (author of The Sense of Wonder) thinks we've stumbled upon the secret to world peace with our Seance Parlor Feng Shui project: 

Prof. Oddfellow has carried the logical approach to nonsense to even greater heights than before. The logic of two absurd systems logically joined into a masterpiece of faith for fools that could stop us from killing each other. My delight lies in making up meaning, but his talent in this is unsurpassed. This treatise will lurk about on our coffee table waiting to preside over a promising guest. In the meantime, I might play with feng shui myself.

Woohoo!

The magic song from Half-Past Bedtime by Henry Howarth Bashford, 1922.

From St. Nicholas magazine.

From The Adventures of Prince Prigio and of His Son, Prince Ricardo by Andrew Lang, 1900.

From Beeton's Christmas Annual, 1860.

"Les magiciens," from A Travers l'Afrique by Verney Lovett Cameron, 1878.

"Melt the magic halls away," from The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, 1870.

"The Dark-Circle": an illustration from an 1875 issue of Wide World magazine.

The Cuddapah Brahmin, named Sheshal, levitates in The Saturday Magazine (1832).

"Again he raised the relic to his lips; the crew of the vessel crumbled into skeletons."  From The Phantom Ship by Frederick Marryat and illustrated by H. R. Millar, 1896.

"Chinese conjuring extraordinary," from The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, translated by Henry Yule, 1875.

"The Chief Magician": an illustration from The King of Schnorrers by Israel Zangwill (1894).