What do "fifty shades of grey" have to do with the Wizard of Oz?  One might think that in the Oz spectrum, ruby (slipper) is connected to emerald (city) by yellow (brick road).  However, there are actually fifty shades of grey between ruby and emerald.  (Spoiler: it's the fifty shades of Toto's coat of many colors.)

A book that is conscious of its own existence?  Not only is that possible, but there's more than one of them.

Tic Tac Tome: The Autonomous Tic Tac Toe Playing Book not only knows your next move as you play a game with it, but when asked in the introduction if it's aware of its own existence, the book asserts its consciousness and then eerily tells the reader that the real question is whether the reader truly exists or is merely a manifestation of its paper-based imagination.  With every round of the game, the reader feels increasingly certain of the book's sentience.

The Young Wizard's Hexopedia reads the mind of its reader throughout, again and again predicting the reader's very next thought or opinion about the information.  In the first chapter the book divines whether or not the reader has begun reading in lieu of a pressing responsibility.  

Clive Barker's demon-narrated novel Mister B. Gone, which increasingly damns the reader's soul with every word read, begs its reader to close its pages and knows if the reader is still there.  The demon explains that this book will do the reader harm beyond description unless the reader does as asked and simply stops reading.  The book can tell whether the reader has trusted the demon and stopped reading.

More subtly, but of special interest to literary critics, in Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the omniscient narrator weaves the reader's consciousness into the novel's by craftily using first-person plural pronouns to transform monologues into dialogues, thus uniting author and reader.  As one analyst has noted, "Suddenly the omniscient narrator reads the mind of the reader, moving beyond the limits of the facade of so-called reality and reminding readers that they too are part of the illusion of truth that a story pretends.  The alienation from the text as truth keeps them aware of the illusion.  The reader colludes with the writer/narrator in the success of the fiction" (Tom Robbins: A Critical Companion).  

Q: "I wonder if the rabbit visits anyone in Cal?"

A: Not without a license: "It is illegal in California for anyone to possess eggs ... without a license" (California Farmer, Vol. 274), possibly because "The urge to find and possess eggs has driven men to distant and dangerous places" (Joseph Kastner, A World of Watchers).

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to lower the sun.

From As Esthetic Drill for Nine Young Ladies, 1900.

You knew that a hat is scaled to fit the head of the wearer, but here's how it's done.  From Daily Colonist, 1900.

"The death of the political hydra," from The Men in the Moon or The Devil to Pay, illustrated by George Cruikshank, 1820.

Here's all you have to do:

1. All you have to do is listen.  (Rob Kapilow, 2008)
2. All you have to do is ask.  (Meredith Walters, 2007)
3. All you have to do is be the middleman.  (Jay Abraham, Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got, 2000)
4. All you have to do is win.  (Trent Frayne, 1968)
5. All you have to do is glance at your calendar.  (Savitri Ramaiah, Lifestyle During Pregnancy, 2003)
6. All you have to do is balance your weight.  (Edwin Burford, Skiing Made Simple, 2007)
7. All you have to do is share your experience, strength, and hope.  (Robert Perkinson, The Gambling Addiction Patient Workbook, 2003)
8. All you have to do is select items from a series of menus and the system does all the work. (Dinesh Maidasani, Comprehensive Information Technology)
9. All you have to do is walk out your front door.   (Howard Wimer, Inner Guidance and the Four Spiritual Gifts, 2014)
10. All you have to do is to hit the RIGHT target with the RIGHT weapon at the RIGHT time.  (J. C. Kemmerer, Tournament Sparring, 2011)
11. All you have to do is be open.  (J. K. Ellis, Perfected Mind Control, 2006)
12. All you have to do is to make it happen.  (Terence Hamilton-Morris, Spirit Rises, 2013)
13. All you have to do is cut your calories and watch what you eat.  (Dag Albright, Chicks, 2007)
14. All you have to do is sort out your own theory of direct mail.  (Tony Attwood, Education Marketing, 2005)
15. All you have to do is think properly.  (Charles Mangua, Son of Woman in Mombasa, 1986)
16. All you have to do is be still and tap into the energy.  (Danielle Garcia, Angel Blessings, 2008)
17. All you have to do is put that down.  (Zane, Infinite Words, 2015)
18. All you have to do is live the life.  (Angus Buchan, Now is the Time, 2014)
19. All you have to do is decide what you want to change.  (Nevaeh Michael, Fall in Love Again, 2012)
20. All you have to do is start.  (Leo Babauta, Zen to Done)
21. All you have to do is send people to the offer and hope they buy.  (Tracy Repchuk, 31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles, 2013)
22. All you have to do is change your thoughts.  (Theron J. Houston, I Once Was Lost, 2009)
23. All you have to do is have Ralph watched when he comes into your city.  (Jeff Inlo, Soul View)
24. All you have to do is state firmly but in a friendly manner, "No thanks, I have other plans."  (Keys to Learning, 2007)
25. All you have to do is get out of your comfort zone and be ready for new experiences.  (Romy Miller, How to Be the Man Women Want, 2009)
26. All you have to do is find a sheet of words, the words being colours.  (Michael Robinson, 10 Ways to Enhance Your Mind and Become More Efficient, 2013)
27. All you have to do is sit back and wait for the money to start rolling in.  (Marketing your Ebook)
28. All you have to do is work backwards and precisely calculate what has to happen to make that journey.  (Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got, 2013)
29. All you have to do is circle all that apply.  (S. F. Berk, The Gender Factory, 2012)
30. All you have to do is simply attend.  (Jonathan C. Smith, Relaxation, Meditation, & Mindfulness, 2005)
31. All you have to do is list what you want out of life and then sign your name at the bottom.  (Alternate Gerrolds: An Assortment of Fictitious Lives, 2013)
32. All you have to do is believe, let go of the past, and move forward!  (Tammy Lynn Robinson, Thoughts of the Heart, 2013)
33. All you have to do is show up.  (Nancy Whitney-Reiter, Now is the Time to Do What You Love, 2009)

"Uneedn't" is a rare word, but it appeared on several vintage postcards.

You've seen paisleys with geometric central elements.  These are armed citadels.  Our exemplifying collage shows the stronghold Fort Independence on the paisley Castle Island, Boston Harbor.

"The only certainty is that a decision must be made, leaving us with the dilemma of decision-making under conditions of great uncertainty." —Nico Stehr, Knowledge Politics

From Harper's Monthly, 1922.

From Chimney-Pot Papers by Charles Brooks, 1919.

From Social Dynamite or The Wickedness of Modern Society from the Discources of T. De Witt Talmage, 1887.

Here's a tricky card from L'Oncle de l'Europe by John Grand-Carteret, 1906.

Here's a centaur from Boletín Oficial de la República Argentina, 1906.

From Life and Death or The Creeping Shadow by D. Lambden Flemming, 1873.

Here's "the last page" from Belmont College's Milady in Brown yearbook, 1909.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

"The apparition of the murdered lady," from The Skeleton Horseman or the Shadow of Death, 1866.

In the farce Kid Curlers by Dorothy Waldo (1916), something that "looks like a game of tic-tac-toe" is mistaken for Japanese script.  (Spoiler: it's neither.)  We wondered which X- and O-like characters of katakana might make sense in a tic-tac-toe arrangement.  Here's what we came up with:

Reading right to left, up to down, we have a call for someone not to resign due to a particular circumstance:

ya me ro (stop)

ya me na (don't quit)

me na na (because of it)

Long before the frogs were singing in the Budweiser ads, they were working for Ford Motor's Model T.

Brockton Fair, 1933.

"Tse'-xo-be (Spider), life symbol of the Osage tribe's Hon-ga (sacred person) U-ta-non-dsi (isolated one) Gens (the earth)."  From the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1915.

"Out on a fly," from Photographic Pastimes by Hermann Schnauss, 1891.

From Smith College's 1917 yearbook.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

From Curiosités Médico-Artistiques by Lucien Nass, 1907.

From an 1887 ad in The Pharmaceutical Era.

Here's a heading for astronomy from Science-Gossip magazine, 1899.

From The Wheel and Cycling Trade Review, 1898.

Here's a watchman from The Cries of London by John Thmoas Smith, 1839.

Is it embarrassing to own a copy of our dictionary of one-letter words?  For Irish Times columnist Frank McNally, definitely so (but he bravely came out all the same in an article entitled To the Power of M: An Irishman's Diary on the Strange Appeal of the Alphanet's 13th Letter):

Far from bosoms, in fact, the original M was a pictogram for water. And according to my Dictionary of One-Letter Words (it’s sad, I know, but I really have one), the writer Victor Hugo noted that it could also visually represent mountains “or a camp with tents pitched in pairs”.

A real estate idea:

Sherlock Homes: the solution for your old dark house.

If you prefer an auction, go to Christie's and ask for Agatha.

"The devil holds the kings of Spain and France together," 1779.

Here's a precursor to Carl Sandburg's Potato Face Blind Man from Rootabaga Stories.  It's "a supposed specimen of aboriginal art" discovered in New Brunswick, 1851, from the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881.

From Christian Iconography by Adolphe Didron, 1851.

From Hardware Merchandising, 1922.

From Kokomo High School's Sargasso yearbook, 1920.

From The Pharmaceutical Era, 1900.

From Parables and Tales by Thomas Gordon Hake and illustrated by Arthur Hughes, 1872.

From Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign by John Ashton, 1903.

From Scientific Amusements by Gaston Tissandier, 1890.

"The secret to being hip is often just adding an -o to words," as we learn in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), analyzed in Funny to Us by Ploeger, Bryant, & Hsieh.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to tint the Cavendish Hotel, Eastbourne, Sussex, 1866.

Here's an "actual reproduction" of the skyscraper sandwich.

"Sick headache": an ad from The Daily Colonist, 1894.

From Make Your Game by George Augustus Sala, 1860.

From Les Etoiles; Derniere Feerie by Joseph Mery and illustrated by Grandville, 1847.

From Reinhardt und Seine Bühne, Bilder von der Arbeit des Deutschen Theaters by Ernest Julian Stern, 1919.

From the Souvenir Year Book and Parish Guide of the Catholic Church of St. John the Baptist, Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1913.

From La Normandie Romanesque et Merveilleuse by Amélie Bosquet, 1845.

"The light disclosed — the skeleton horseman!"  From The Skeleton Horseman or the Shadow of Death, 1866.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to repaint the scene.

From 1927.

Here's a rare depiction of a gnome hatchling, from The Black Aunt by Clara Volkmann Fechner, 1848.

From Revue de l'Art Chrétien, 1857.

From The Grafters of America by Clifton Wooldridge, 1906.

"You don't have to be a psychic to sell oriental rugs.  You only have to be a psychic to buy them."  From Raymond Chandler's "Killer in the Rain," 1964.

From Reineke Fuchs by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1857.

From John Paul's Book, Moral and Instructive, 1874.

From Le Diable Amoureux, Roman Fantastique by Jacques Cazotte, 1845.

From The Vision, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, 1916.