From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"No one is to be blamed for all this horror except everybody and everything."
—John Cowper Powys, Porius

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for Gary Barwin:

What strikes us about this item from The Wide World Magazine (1908) is where, exactly, the mysterious figure in question suddenly disappeared.  Note that two locations are mentioned:

1. "Denver, Colorado"
2. "Denver (Colorado)"

How many people — dozens, hundreds, or dare we suggest thousands? — have suddenly disappeared in "Denver (Colorado)"?

Our very serious advice: Do not enter parenthetical locations frivolously.  Neither a trail of breadcrumbs nor GPS software will be of any service.

There's so much to love in this first page of William De Morgan's When Ghost Meets Ghost (1914).

The first chapter is very rightly numbered zero.  Shouldn't all ghost stories begin with chapter zero?

The chapter summary is playfully honest about what it amounts to, and it mentions a "somewhere that is now nowhere."

In the first paragraph, there's a withering mention of several young ladies having "lost their individuality."

The third paragraph exposes a great truth: a story can do without accuracy.

"In the long run, if you're patient, you discover that, just like laughter and tears, life and art have a tendency to end up merging and intertwining to form a single figure, at once comic and tragic, a figure as singular as that formed by the bull and the bullfighter." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris

To readers who have ever juggled more than one book at a time, we present the Bibliofool, whom we found in Bibliophile magazine, 1908:

The way sea life keeps track of tides is less poetic than salty romantics would have you believe.  (The illustration is from Five Minutes' Stories by Mrs. Molesworth, 1888.)

Marguerite Duras, when asked if death frightened her, said, "I don't know know anything anymore since I've reached the sea." Enrique Vila-Matas said, "What terrifies me about the idea of eternal death is to never be able to see the sea again, the waves breaking in winter on deserted beaches."

Time-traveling through old magazines, one truly does experience Einsteinian relativity.  Take, for example, this illustration of "a modern home" from 1893 (Cosmopolitan Magazine).  We also love how old magazines regularly long for the return of traditional holiday celebrations.  Even though the holiday trappings of the 1800s meet our current ideal of olde worlde authenticity, there was a time when all that was newfangled.  We can just hear the older generation back then, granting that the yule logs, holly wreaths, mistletoe, and snow effigies seem pagan enough, but if the kids only knew how things were really done back in the day!  Every olden time had its own olden time, and we're left with nostalgia for nostalgia.

Let's begin with our favorite acclamation point — complete with a demonstrative waving flag. Type a regular exclamation point, then a triangular dingbat next to it. Superscript the dingbat to raise it up the flagpole. The dingbat we use is Lucida Grande #8227.

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Another acclamation point represents a martini glass raised in a toast (the Y portion is like the cross-section of a glass). It's Lucida Grande #7924.

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A third acclamation point communicates vocal approval. A big circular mouth engulfs the dot. It's Lucida Grande #0664.

The first acclimation point signifies Dorothy's concept of "getting the hang of something." It features a dot at both the top and bottom, as if the mark were hanging from itself. It's Lucida Grande #7883.

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The second acclimation point represents acclimatization as symbolized by an umbrella. It's Ludica Grande #7788.

!^‣   Ỵ   ʘ   ị   Ṭ

Geof Huth contends that "There is no opposite of potato."  He may be correct, and we'll be open to agreement once we're finished peeling all these "negative potatoes" (a.k.a. "antipotatoes).