"Yex" isn't a word? Oh, yex it is!"  Two stills from Dear Ladies.

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "Wonderful dream, as recounted by a gentleman who passed the night in a room hung with 'goblin tapestry.'"  This should also be of interest: How to Believe in Your Elf.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for Jeff Hawkins.

An illustration from a 1900 issue of Harmsworth's magazine.  The caption reads: "'Stay there,' she said, 'or I will move the pieces.'"   See If a Chessman Were a Word: A Chess-Calvino Dictionary.

An illustration from an 1877 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "An arrangement in 'Fiddle-de-dee.'"

Time Will Tell: Father Time reads the palm of the New Year: an illustration from a 1903 issue of Punch magazine.

An illustration from an 1896 issue of Pall Mall magazine.  The caption reads: "The mist condensed into a body."

Here's a flying fish from an 1867 issue of Beadle's magazine.

An illustration from an 1886 issue of Punch magazine.

An illustration from an 1879 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "There's always a something."

A precursor to the cult television series The Prisoner:  "Are you the gentleman who occupies Number Six"? From The Saturday Evening Post, 5 November 1904.

"I've said it before, but it bears repeating: all the good advice in the world won't help if you don't have a teachable spirit."
—John C. Maxwell, The Complete 101 Collection

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

If only all terrible reviews could be of this caliber, fewer authors might be driven to drink.  Dr. Thomas Hodd, of the Université de Moncton, reviewed our Franzlations (a guide to the imaginary Kafka parables) for the Journal of Canadian Poetry, Volume 28.  Long story short, our book is worse than cancerous poetry (quite literally, he says it compares unfavorably to a specific book of poems about cancer that should have been left on the hospital bed and not published).  Franzlations, he says, is "more like an artifact than a book of poetry" — criticism we will take on the chin with a British stiff-upper-lip (as it were).  Our "images and phrases begin to resonate, although for what purpose is unclear since the esotericism implied within these pages feels contrived, and ultimately fails to extend beyond the pages of the book" — to which we retort, "That's what they said about The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus!"  But in all seriousness, esoteric is defined as being intended for a small number of people with a specialized knowledge, so if the esotericism of Franzlations were to be unleashed from the pages of the book, it would transmute into exotericism (intended for the general public), an idea that causes our corrosive juices to reflux.  As we meditate upon Dr. Hodd's scathing conclusion, we have to smile (enigmatically, to be sure), because to be "neither poetry nor art," neither words nor images, is very Zen.  Dr. Hodd has inadvertently acknowledged that we've attained enlightenment.