"Ancient Imperial Chinese bed, carved and lacquered, sent by that government to the last Paris expoisition and returned to Pekin."  From The Witchery of Sleep by Willard Moyer, 1903.

"The day the light went out."  From Lighted Pathway, 1970.

From The Outline of Everything by Hector B. Toogood, 1923.  

From Scribner's 1877.

Tell us about it!  "You see a lot of strange things in this business."  Via UFO Newsclipping Service, 1999.

So rare to see a cat waterskiing.  From The Cat Who Wanted To Go Home by Jill Tomlinson.

Disappointing -- this turned out to be a book on economics.  But economics used to be way more interesting.  The Sphinx Catechism by Henry Rawie, 1911.

Breaking in half with laughter.  From The Moon Prince by Richard Kendall Munkittrick, 1893.

From The Fables of Aesop, 1925.

It is the capturing of time's by-products, the "odd moments," that lies at the heart of our experiments with temporality.  From Susquehanna's 1947 yearbook.

From Concordia's 1968 yearbook.

From The Fifty Gates of Understanding by Aleta Blanche Baker and illustrated by Gibbs Mason, 1930.

Seeing things in the clouds.  From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's 1912 yearbook.

From The Brownie Handbook (Canada).

From William and Mary's 1948 yearbook.

May roaming mummies be kept under wraps.  From Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna Handbook.

From The Complete Cynic, Being Bunches of Wisdom Culled from the Calendars of Oliver Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford, and Addison Mizner, 1910.

"She seemed turned to stone."  From Collier's, 1915.

When you do the yanked tablecloth trick but then they don't want the tablecloth back ... one of the major risks of the tablecloth trick.  From Together magazine, 1962.