This is actually a Googlewhack, as of this posting: "A pound of prevention is worth an ounce of cheese."  From St. Nicholas magazine, 1903.

"Jamie, we are both playing a false game," from The Flower of Gala Water and Other Stories by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr, 1895.

Magicians (like Uri Geller) who perform spoon bending aren't necessarily religious, but they have a patron saint just the same.  Here's the patron saint of magical cutlery, from The Saturday Evening Post, 1839.

The phenomenon of people holding up individual letters of a word and kerfuffling goes way back, apparently. This example is from 1910, in the Hampden-Sydney College Kaleidoscope yearbook.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

"The Mist Lady," from Dormer Windows by Anne MacDonald, 1926.

Here's a precursor to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, from Twycross's Redemption by Alfred Saint Johnston, 1888.  The caption reads, "Don't let us pretend that any longer, dear."

When I learned that Andy died, I knew I'd quite literally lost a part of my heart.  It was at a grand bonfire in the Nevada desert that a magus once arranged Andy, me, and three others (whose identities I'm not at liberty to divulge) into a pentacle, intertwining our arms in a special way so that when we squeezed hands a heartbeat pulsed around and around the circle.  For some timeless moments, we five were a single beating heart.  (There's a Sufi doctrine that the heart has five faces, each pointed, in turn, toward the divine, the world of pure spirits, formal exemplars, the visible world, and the synthesis of the inwardly hidden and outwardly manifest.)  Even before that ritual, Andy had been hanging around me a bit, shyly or perhaps covertly seeking to get a grasp on what exactly was going on with me.  I know I let down some masks, but he never let on whether I revealed my true self.  He was a witch masking as a magician, and he knew I was something, at the very least a fellow outsider hovering at the edge of a gathering of eccentrics in the middle of the desert.  We briefly commiserated on our respective dark nights of the soul, but only later, secondhand, did I learn that Andy had recently been exiled from his coven.  Andy had a maxim for how not to drown in an overwhelming flood of language: "Don't trip over the fall of letters."  My own Muse took that and twisted "fall" into "Autumn": https://www.oneletterwords.com/weblog/?id=6274.  And so, my heart skipped a beat when I learned that Andy died.  I didn't really know him, or didn't allow myself to.  As the ancient Egyptian proverb goes, "He who knows his own heart, the fate knows him."

"There are others," from The Literary Digest, 1890.

From the Hacawa yearbook of Lenoir-Rhyne University, 1910.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

From Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Macaulay, 1904.

Here's a comet falling to the earth by way of Buddha's Crystal and Other Fairy Tales, 1908.

In other words, lay bare your agony moderately slowly with loving expression.  Lyric by William Smyth (1765-1849).

These apparitions appear in St. Nicholas magazine.

Here's a precursor to the "Fusilli Jerry" episode of Seinfeld.  It appears in The Jingle Book by Carolyn Wells and illustrated by Oliver Herford, 1899.  (Thanks, Jonathan!)

An illustration from Ballads and Songs by William Makepeace Thackeray (1896).  The caption reads: "She comes from the past and revisits my room."

"A human devil; or, the Biter Bit," from The New Budget of Recitations, 1854.

From The Irish Green Book by George Stronach, 1888.

"Mr. Asterias perlustrated the sea-coast for several days, and reaped disappointment, but not despair," from Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock, 1896.

   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(
`-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `

From The mystic test book; or, The magic of the cards. Giving the mystic meaning of these wonderful and ancient emblems in their relationship to the heavenly bodies, under all conditions; with rules and processes for reading or delineating the emblems by Olney H. Richmond, 1919.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Sherlock Holmes’ Ascertainment of the Chemical Elements of Purity

From The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, In Prose and Verse, 1881.

   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(
`-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `

From The New Budget of Recitations, 1854.

An illustration from The Half Hour Library of Travel, Nature and Science for Young Readers (1896).  The caption reads: "The king of the wind."

Here's Toto, 70 dog years before the debut of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  From Home Life on an Ostrich Farm by Annie Martin, 1890.

"By the sheen of the foam I beheld two skelingtons sitting in their coffins." From The Story Hunter or Tales of the Weird and Wild by Ernest Richard Suffling, 1896.

"A monstrous creature with bat-like wings flapped toward me and I fired desperately at it," from Fantastic Adventures, July, 1939.

"There we two were, I looking up at the viper, and the viper looking down upon me, flickering at me with its tongue," from Lavengro by George Borrow, 1896.

"The devil's walk," from Roses and Holly, 1867

Q: The world is sh*t, isn't it?

"The devil's ramble on earth," from The New Budget of Recitations, 1854.

"So monstrous in his mind," from Phœbe or the Miller's Maid, 1854.

"Cut the pictures into strips and ribbons," from The Heart of Princess Osra by Anthony Hope, 1896.

From St. Nicholas magazine.

From The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum, 1904.

Hypnotix writes:

Hello good sir, I pose you a question (or 20) I must say, your list of “duties” [as presented here] was quite stimulating and was the first reason I had to follow you. I will just go ahead and jump into question one at the surface. I could see that you are quite concise with your wording so I will address it as such.

When you say duties, It makes me feel as though you were tasked with these goals. If so, where was the inspiration from?

My next question is, Was this written in succession or over time? If so, surely this is an extension of surrealism. Any and all of those thoughts could be linked together (and very well may be) but oddly enough, forging those connections on the fly is also an extension of surrealism which webs out into a whole new network of problems and questions I will not elaborate upon at this time.

My final question is simply why? Perhaps this is even the most important question of them all. I wonder if you would flip number 2 back on me.

I ask this all under the pretense of 5,8, and 10 :P I am not sure why, but this feels important. I have never been so intrigued by a list of anything before.

Thank you for the great message, Hypnotix, and may I first say that your appreciation of my duties as Attendant of the Borgesian Circulating Depository is a mirror of your own fascinating qualities.  As a wise someone once said, it takes one to know one.  So I sincerely applaud your insight into your own multifacetedness.  You asked whether or not I was tasked with these goals, and the simple answer is that one's foremost duties are owed to oneself, so it's all voluntary (or fated, depending upon the nature of the universe).  You asked if my list of duties was written over time, and the truth is that I wrote them all at once.  (But the truth is also that they summarize a life's work.)  I like that you noted how forging connections between the items would constitute an extension of surrealism.  Your final and most important question is "Why?" ... and I find myself disinclined to respond to that one; even though I could express answers in several sentences, I don't wish to define boundaries and thereby set limits.  Plus, the "why" is unfolding (or, um, blossoming might be more accurate).  Meanwhile, just between you and me, my task of the day is to measure the infinitesimal passage of time in every iteration of the Droste effect.  (This task was actually assigned to me by my magic teacher in the Netherlands, George Parker.)  Best regards! —Prof. Oddfellow

---

Meanwhile, thanks to Archie McPhee for showcasing our photo of lucid dreaming with tiny hand puppets!

The wind god of Japan, from East and West by Edwin Arnold, 1896.

"Up the mountain sides of dreams," from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and illustrated by C. Robinson, 1896.

"There appeared an extraordinary sight," from Jess by H. Rider Haggard and illustrated by Maurice Greiffenhagen, 1896.

The Behe-moth and the Mam-moth, from The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, 1881.

"The piano is a wonder box," from St. Nicholas magazine.

Here's some scarecrow construction from Buddha's Crystal and Other Fairy Stories, 1908

Here's a precursor to the "What would Jesus do?" meme, from Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times, 1895.  The song is entitled, "What will You do with Jesus?"

Here's a precursor to the song "Walking with Scissors" by Gregory de Rocher's band Lowfish.  From The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere, 1851.

Here's a captive audience from The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, 1881.

Here's a precursor to Playskool's roly-poly Weeble toys, 1971, from St. Nicholas magazine, 1912.  Illustration by Katherine Maynadier Daland.

From The Briar Patch by Sweet Briar College, 1920.

An illustration from Peter Ibbetson by George Du Maurier (1892).  The caption reads: "To the winter palace."

We're honored that the renowned philosopher of magic Robert E. Neale (author of The Sense of Wonder) thinks we've stumbled upon the secret to world peace with our Seance Parlor Feng Shui project: 

Prof. Oddfellow has carried the logical approach to nonsense to even greater heights than before. The logic of two absurd systems logically joined into a masterpiece of faith for fools that could stop us from killing each other. My delight lies in making up meaning, but his talent in this is unsurpassed. This treatise will lurk about on our coffee table waiting to preside over a promising guest. In the meantime, I might play with feng shui myself.

Woohoo!

We're pleased to debut a clockwork remix of a song by Jim Girouard entitled "We're Almost There."  Before the invention of MIDI, programmed music required meticulously timed Grandfather clocks, and every performance ticked at 60 bpm. In the tradition of the original "old school," this clockwork remix features vintage timepieces. The original song features the line, "There's a light in the church up the road ahead, in a place where the living meet the dead."  You can hear the original vocal/guitar version here: http://holistictech.net/jim/music/13%20-%20We%27re%20Almost%20There.mp3

If you've ever wondered about the precise location of the funny bone, here it is.  From Otterbein College's yearbook The Sibyl, 1905.  The text reads, "Here's where we jab you."  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

The magic song from Half-Past Bedtime by Henry Howarth Bashford, 1922.

"Mesmeric Ghosts": an illustration from The Children's Fairy History of England by Forbes Edward Winslow (1889).

An illustration from The Stealers of Light by Marie, Queen of Roumania (1916).

"Music: the most sonic of all the dark arts."  That's comedian and recording artist Matt Berry in the second series of Vic and Bob's House of Fools.

Yes, a donkey drinking tea is very nearly a Googlewhack as of this posting (one search result being for a game of Interference in which "donkey drinking tea" breaks down into "black box.")  From Taking Tales by William Henry Giles Kingston, 1889.

Here's an illustration of sound waves from Practical Physics by Robert Millikan, 1922.

"You could dip this house in water": an ad in American Homes and Gardens, 1905.

It's only [wickedly] funny if the witches laugh, from The Violet Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, 1906.

"The Other Me": an illustration from Red Apple and Silver Bells by Alice B. Woodward (1899).

You know the finger game "Here's the church, here's the steeple," in which hands are clasped to represent a church, then pointer fingers are raised to form a spire, then the remaining fingers are revealed as a congregation?  Well, it's not just a game.  From Blasts from The Ram's Horn, 1902.

Here are the colors of the void from Catalog of Portables and Shades by Welsbach Commercial Company, 1910.

"I've been bewitched," from St. Nicholas magazine.

Here's a precursor to M. C. Escher's Drawing Hands, 1948, from Haverford College Athletic Annual and 1900 Class Book.

From 1811.

A volcano slightly damaged by fire, a grassy knoll, and other items for sale from King Time or The Mystical Land of the Hours by Percy Keese Fitzhugh, 1908.

Here's a precursor to the iconic "Blown-Away Man" photo, made famous in the Maxell ad campaigns.  From Cobb's Bill-of-Fare by Irwin Shrewsbury Cobb, 1913.

If you've never heard of Epitical Bychology [sic] or Trigonomety [sic], it may be because they both died in May, 1897.  From the Agnes Scott Institute's Aurora yearbook.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

"The [threefold] rays of the bright polar star" (from Lachin y Gair by Lord Byron).