Jack Frost and a parsnip from Mother Earth's Children by Elizabeth Gordon, 1914.

"About this time there occurred a strange incident."  A preliminary drawing for a 1950 strip cartoon version of Animal Farm from the cartoonist Norman Pett and his writing partner Donald Freeman.

Isn't it disconcerting when your book reads you back?  From The Actress of Padua by Richard Penn Smith, 1836.

In Absolutely Fabulous (series 3, episode 3), students seek a name for a presentation.  They brainstorm "gen...etics ethics" and "gentics."  But we found the name they never landed on: genethliacal (as seen in Genethliacal Astrology Comprehending an Enquiry Into, and Defense of the Celestial Science by John Worsdale, 1798).

Before a steamship went over a mountain in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, there was Up the Matterhorn in a Boat by Marion Manville Pope, 1897.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click for the painted version.

"Chicago's temperature soared" (Richard Oulahan, The Man Who, 1971).  And here's what Chicago's soaring temperature looks like.

"Ravioli 'Dave' -- no credit, no money, no business, no phone."

You've heard of a seafood croquette, but here's what the game of fish croquet looks like.  From Geographic Society of Chicago Bulletin, 1913.

From the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives.  (The enlargement of the mysterious "face" is our own.)

Here is revealed that the alphabet is actually grown in two varnished boxes (one uppercase and one lowercase, naturally).  From The American Florist, 1894.

Here's a precursor to David Lynch's "Ricky Board" art piece in which rows of nearly identical objects are given different names.  From Yankee Enchantments by Charles Battell Loomis and illustrated by F. Y. Cory, 1900.  Here's the Ricky Board we made with asterisks in honor of the celebrated poet and novelist Gary Barwin.

Though it's been said that "Writing non-fiction doesn't offer the same creative kick that spinning a tale from whole cloth provides" (Charles Dougherty), a lack of cloth guarantees nudity.  From A Picture of Woonsocket or The Truth in Its Nudity by Thomas Man, 1835.

The angel of peace contracted cholera, from Die Muskete, 1912.