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).

Below, Prof. Oddfellow reveals one of the many tools* he uses to create Abecedarian — a mysterious genie bottle that arrived in the mail one day.