Ruined castles are actually the bones of once vibrant creations, not only alive but kicking.  (You've surely heard of flying buttresses.)  Our illustration of "a real live castle" is from Our Boys in Ireland by Henry Willard French, 1891.

An illustration from Peg Woffington by Charles Reade (1868).  The caption reads: "Oh, yes! you are beautiful, you are gifted, and the eyes of thousands wait upon your every word and look."

Uroboric yin-yang fish: an illustration from an 1896 issue of The Idler magazine.

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt shares a precursor to Victor Borge.  According to H. Allen Smith, Vladimir de Pachmann would call for a book to elevate himself on a piano stool that was supposedly too low, then pretend he was now too high, and then remove one page to get the height just right.

An illustration from The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story by H. Rider Haggard (1911).  The caption reads: "Changed indeed, mysterious, wonderful."

"We can – rather surprisingly – owe duties to the dead and also to a great range of anonymous future people." —Tom Bentley, The Moral Universe

We learn in the BBC series The Mighty Boosh that "there are over seventeen mirrors in the mirror world."  We find a precursor in The Century of Louis XIV by Frances Cashel Hoey, 1896.

An illustration from Gentlemen All and Merry Companions by Ralph Wilhelm Bergengren (1922).  The caption reads: "There was a long, white flash in the moonlight."

A precursor to the Death By Lemon cake recipe.  An illustration from an 1879 issue of Punch magazine.

Q: How do the eponymous Cat People escape being caged?

An illustration from The Bachelors Club by Laurel Zangwill (1891).  The caption reads: "Again the voice came from the centre of the curling rings, 'I am your father's ghost.'"

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

photo by Cobalt 123

"'I just came out with a dirty joke DVD.  I'll have to send you a copy.'  The stupid part about me saying this was that it was apropos of nothing."
—Gilbert Gottfried, Rubber Balls and Liquor (2011)

An illustration from The King of the Conjurors by James Skipp Borlase (1877).  The caption reads: "Buried in the sand."

"Farce is only funny if it is true."
—Mikhail Bulgakov, Zoya's Apartment: A Tragic Farce in Three Acts (1991)

"Tell my secret? No, indeed, not I; / Perhaps some day, who knows?"  From Through Woodland and Meadow and Other Poems by Marie Low, 1891.

An illustration from The Cup of Fury by Rupert Hughes (1919).  The caption reads: "Aren't you afraid to push on when you can't see where you're going?"

An illustration from In the Sweet and Dry by Christopher Morley and Bart Haley (1919), illustrated by Gluyas Williams.  The caption reads: "'Hush,' said Quimbleton nervously. 'Someone may be watching us. ... You see I water the flowers with champagne.'"

A glass half frozen

Never boils.

An illustration from The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story by H. Rider Haggard (1911).  The caption reads: "Guided, guarded by the spirits of dead suns."

An illustration from The Fur Country by Jules Verne (1874).  The caption reads: "A new country was springing into being."

Jonathan shares:

About a week ago, I read this, in a book by Ira Wallach called Gutenberg's Folly, published in 1954:

"Some of that book," he said, "was written on the cylinder head of a ship ploughing through the Red Sea in the heat of an Arabian summer.[...] I'll never forget it," he said. "I proofread that cylinder head myself!"

Just a few days later, I read this, in a book by Frank Sullivan called The Life and Times of Martha Hepplethwaite, published in 1926:

Then I felt a strange impulse to write a poem. There was no paper handy. I acted upon the impulse of the moment and scribbled the verse upon the back of a taxicab I had been leaning against, waiting for traffic to pass. The taxi driver was very angry with me when he discovered what I had done, but when he read the poem he wept and said it was marvelous, and I must sell it to some magazine.

The poem was there on the taxicab, so we had to take the taxicab along, too, and we felt so foolish dragging that taxicab into magazine office after magazine office. Finally we sold the taxicab and the poem for $14, and you cannot know how delighted the taxicab chauffeur and I were with that first money earned from my poetry.

An illustration from Agatha: A Fanciful Flight for a Gusty Night by George Halse (1860).

"There are significant differences between what's interesting and what's really interesting." —Jim Sterne, Social Media Metrics

Here's a precursor to fans of Seal (Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel), from seventy years before the singer-songwriter's birthday.

It's funny only "if you know the real-life story behind the joke."
—New York Magazine (Dec. 6, 1982)

The first "you mama such a dog" joke appears in Ghost Stories (1865).  The caption reads: "There is the nocturnal visitor whom you have so long taken for the ghost of your mother."

"You should write a book in your spare time.  The Grand Duchess's Guide to Winter Amusements: How to Have Fun in the Snow Without Showing Your Petticoats." —Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

An illustration from The Grand Old Mystery Unravelled by Anonymous, illustration by Harry Furniss (1894).  The caption reads: "'They will say I have lost my head!' he exclaimed, wildly, throwing up his arms with that energy that has so often pulverised his opponents and raised his friends to heights of enthusiasm. 'But the fact is,' he continued, 'they have lost theirs!'"

This diagram illustrating the possible nature of the process of a telepathic transmission of a conscious thought appears in The Verdict: —?: A Study of the Probable Origin of Certain Physic Phenomena Together with a Record of Very Striking Personal Experiences by Tertium Quid (1920).

An illustration from The Fur Country by Jules Verne (1874).  The caption reads: "Some of the icebergs assumed extraordinary forms."

It's unlucky to rechristen a boat "Jonah" with an albatross quill on Candlemas Day if a red-headed woman is whistling on board.

Thanks to Gordon Meyer (of Smart Home Hacks fame), who for years has stocked our minimalist coloring book (complete with white crayon) at Quimby's bookstore.  Here's a photo of Gordon's presentation:

He pulled out a drawer at random—Schedule K-36, Minor Social Offenses—and ran his embittered eye over a card.  It was marked Conversational Felonies, and began thus:

Arguing
Blandishing
Buffoonery
Contradicting
Demurring
Ejaculating
Exaggerating
Facetiousness
Giggling
Hemming and Hawing
Implying
Insisting
Jesting

Each item also referred to another card on which the penalty was noted and legal test cases summarized.

An illustration from The Gate Beautiful by John Ward Stimson (1903).  The caption reads: "The Scroll of Life."

Here's a winter's night from The Poetry of Robert Burns, Vol. 1 (1896).

An illustration from The Ivory Snuff Box by Frederic Arnold Kummer (1912).  The caption reads: "There lay Richard, her husband, upon the floor, his face encircled by a ring of blinding light."

"It's a wise person who monotonizes existence because then each small incident, if one knows how to read it in a literary way, has a wondrous quality." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

From our former outpost at Twitter:

An illustration from The Fur Country by Jules Verne (1874).  The caption reads: "It is more beautiful than the Aurora Borealis."

photo by Cobalt 123

"'Frivolous,' I said, apropos of nothing."
—Mary Daheim, Alpine Escape (2011)

An illustration from Life in the Mines or Crime Avenged by Charles H. Sompson (1898).  The caption reads: "It was the Phantom Horseman!"

An illustration from City Festivals by Will Carleton (1892).

Here we are catching some rays in a tucked-away little place some folks will recognize.

An illustration from The Secret of Wrexford by Esther Carr (1878).

You knew that Juan Ponce de León led the first European expedition to Florida.  But did you know he also inspired the presidential White House?

An illustration from John Dough and the Cherub by L. Frank Baum (1906).

"The story is only funny if you tell it in a funny way."
—Ferdinand F. Fournies, Why Customers Don't Do What You Want Them to Do-And What to Do About It (1994)

An illustration from The Master Key by L. Frank Baum (1901).  The caption reads: "Those fellows seem to be looking for trouble."

An illustration from The Wrong Woman by Charles D. Stewart (1912).  The caption reads: "The stars, a vast audience, had all taken their places."

From literary scalawag Jonathan Caws-Elwitt:

There was a precocious young zebra,
Who was second to none in cerebra.
She read Plato, con brio,
With Venus in Leo,
And Leibniz when Mars was in Libra.

"Somnambulist—A judge tries a case while asleep."  An illustration from Hypnotism: Its Facts, Theories and Related Phenomena by Carl Sextus (1893).

An illustration from The Mystery of the Red Flame by George Barton (1918).  The caption reads: "The dearest wish of my life...has been to live in Washington."

Here's a precursor to Merrell's line of "angelic shoes," from Kulturgeschichte by Friedrich Anton Heller von Hellwald, 1896.

Here's the quietest instrument in all of Florida, at the Saint Augustine cathedral.  Recording artist Ken Clinger notes that it would be an elegant setting for performing John Cage's silent composition 4′33″.  Ken adds, "The fact that it still has a piano stool makes it seem to invite use for contemplation."

"The sea's relentless waves are like continually renewing sets of teeth gnawing at the land, and with over 221,000 miles of coastline in the world, that's a lot of nibbling.  But the sea is capable of more than just amphibious assaults: it can also penetrate the land through a series of air raids, as water from the oceans is air-lifted up into the atmosphere where it creates a formation of clouds that are ready to deploy their water cargo down on the rocks and the soil of this land at will.  The land invasion can come in varying degrees, from light rain raids through to heavy blanket bombings, randomly deployed throughout the year.  The resulting saturation causes the land to weather and erode, which in turn can cause devastating mud- and landslides." —Richard Horne, A is for Armageddon: A Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World as We Know It (2010)

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An illustration from The Haunted Man by Charles Dickens (1848).

Here's a precursor to MGM's Cowardly Lion of Oz, from Le Grand Siècle by Émile Bourgeois, 1896.

"Somnambulist—Playing while asleep": an illustration from Hypnotism: Its Facts, Theories and Related Phenomena by Carl Sextus (1893).

An illustration from The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901).

A frosty day from The Leisure Hour, 1895.

An illustration from The Master Key by L. Frank Baum (1901).

It's "funny only if you know some basic geography."
—Indianapolis Monthly (Oct. 2005)

An illustration from Farewell Nikola by Guy Newell Boothly (1901).

An illustration from The Rest Hollow Mystery by Rebecca Newman Porter (1922).  The caption reads: "Good God! Anything could happen in a place like this!"

An illustration from Monitor at Megson's by Robert Leighton, illustration by Gordon Browne (1906).