"I converse with them at least fours hours every day," from Gulliver's Travels, via Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

From The Pink Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, 1897.

It seems that Horace Scudder compiled fables from A to ... well, from A to Æ, as it turned out.  But as Hannah Arendt reminds us, the "absolute lies in the very act of beginning itself."

Here's a man in the moon with a Mona Lisa smile, from St. Nicholas magazine, 1898.  Recall our previous proof that the Mona Lisa's facial features correspond to the lunar landscape.

"O Queen of Earth and Heaven!  O Peerless among Women, the dreaded day hath dawned!"  From The Eye of Istar by William Le Queux, 1897.

"A puzzle for the Devil," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

"The sorceress divines Faustine's fortune by poisoning a young slave girl," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

Here's a drop of beer magnified, from The World's Temperance Reciter by Joseph Malins, 1890.

Someone should write a book on unconscious eating, as so often people eat in trances. —William Keckler

Early models of the "bicycle built for two" betrayed a hierarchy of wealth and power.  From St. Nicholas magazine, 1877.

"He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me."  From Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, via Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

From The Pink Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, 1897.

From Purdue University's Debris yearbook, 1902.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

"I hope you don't take this the wrong way.  I know you're running from something, something that terrifies you."
—Linda Broday, Twice a Texas Bride

"A messenger of evil," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

"And crawled beneath the sofa in despair!"  From The Bashful Earthquake by Oliver Herford (1899).

It's only funny if the joke speaks for itself.  Here's "the autobiography of a good joke," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, edited by Percy Bolingbroke Saint John, 1884.