Dancing to celebrate the destruction of the world.  From Earthquakes by Arnold Boscoqitz and translated by Coulson Bell Pitman, 1890.

"Their torches flashed luridly in the blackness of the night."  From The Madeira Islands by Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, 1896.

Here's the proper way to exit a fancy dress party, from Bohemian Paris of To-day by William Chambers Morrow and illustrated by Édouard Cucuel, 1899.

We're surprised and honored by these portraits courtesy of filmmaker, screenwriter and actor Adam Brooks (of The Editor, Father's Day, and Manborg fame).

Renowned magic headliner Jeff McBride tweets:

Is Conley's HEXOPEDIA considered the "NEW magic?" or is "HEX-O" the OLD magic renewing itself? Perhaps"HEX_O" is the Phoenix of THIS generation?

Meanwhile, check out how we illustrated the chapter headings for McBride's book The Show Doctor, now in softcover.

A Retroactive Lifetime Goal*: we were called "the poster fellow for the Center of Advanced Hindsight."  Here we are looking forward to some advanced hindsight.

*Phrase courtsey of literary scalawag Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.

Hypnotix writes:

Hello good sir, I pose you a question (or 20) I must say, your list of “duties” [as presented here] was quite stimulating and was the first reason I had to follow you. I will just go ahead and jump into question one at the surface. I could see that you are quite concise with your wording so I will address it as such.

When you say duties, It makes me feel as though you were tasked with these goals. If so, where was the inspiration from?

My next question is, Was this written in succession or over time? If so, surely this is an extension of surrealism. Any and all of those thoughts could be linked together (and very well may be) but oddly enough, forging those connections on the fly is also an extension of surrealism which webs out into a whole new network of problems and questions I will not elaborate upon at this time.

My final question is simply why? Perhaps this is even the most important question of them all. I wonder if you would flip number 2 back on me.

I ask this all under the pretense of 5,8, and 10 :P I am not sure why, but this feels important. I have never been so intrigued by a list of anything before.

Thank you for the great message, Hypnotix, and may I first say that your appreciation of my duties as Attendant of the Borgesian Circulating Depository is a mirror of your own fascinating qualities.  As a wise someone once said, it takes one to know one.  So I sincerely applaud your insight into your own multifacetedness.  You asked whether or not I was tasked with these goals, and the simple answer is that one's foremost duties are owed to oneself, so it's all voluntary (or fated, depending upon the nature of the universe).  You asked if my list of duties was written over time, and the truth is that I wrote them all at once.  (But the truth is also that they summarize a life's work.)  I like that you noted how forging connections between the items would constitute an extension of surrealism.  Your final and most important question is "Why?" ... and I find myself disinclined to respond to that one; even though I could express answers in several sentences, I don't wish to define boundaries and thereby set limits.  Plus, the "why" is unfolding (or, um, blossoming might be more accurate).  Meanwhile, just between you and me, my task of the day is to measure the infinitesimal passage of time in every iteration of the Droste effect.  (This task was actually assigned to me by my magic teacher in the Netherlands, George Parker.)  Best regards! —Prof. Oddfellow

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Meanwhile, thanks to Archie McPhee for showcasing our photo of lucid dreaming with tiny hand puppets!

To quote Thelma Ritter in the film Boeing-Boeing, "It's not easy, you know?"  We dedicate more hours a day than one might believe going through books digitized by Google, the British Library, and the Internet Archive, and we curate imagery that strikes our fancy, but then we take all said imagery into Photoshop to undo the various damage from the original scanning process: we correct contrast, sharpness, color balance, and trimming, and we try our best to erase digitizing artifacts that don't belong.  And it's all just for the love of it.  Granted we did include a particularly glamorous category of our finds in the book Ghost in the Scanning Machine, but the vast, vast majority of the pieces are just for here and our blog on Tumblr.  Thanks for the appreciation!  We suppose many folks just assume we stumble upon all this material, but in fact it's all hand-picked with painstaking care (with the marvelous side effect of boosting our time travel abilities).