We were delighted to spot our How to Be Your Own Cat in a wedding registry, between low-alcohol cocktail recipes and Grateful Dead lyrics, and beneath a "gun belt" of 20 bottles of herbal bitters.  Sounds about right.  Kit Kilmartin and Steven Cavagnet, may your union be blessed with nine lives.

After an editor's note of no fewer than 142 pages, the editor presents the book itself, saying (presumably with a straight face), "I offer no remarks on it."  From The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1824.

Here's a precursor to Wolfgang Stiller's unsettling human-faced matchstick exhibition.  From Lustige Blätter, 1917.

"Even when at the circus Willie was not happy."  From Harper's Young People, 1888.

From Jugend, 1928.

"The old woman went out to ask the moon the way to the castle."  From Fairy Tales from the Far North by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, 1897.

How do 600 winters compare to our own age?  All is revealed in our video about how to use a haunted mirror to tell whether you're dreaming of awake.  Responding to this video, Jim writes: "Definitely by far your very best video yet... it's hysterical... it leaves you completely baffled at the end... posted it on Facebook."

Marja writes: "I can see this over and over and over.  Your story, the way you tell it, leads me away from all the ordinary things.  Love the non-ending.  Grace Jones might not be impressed.  I am.  Thank you."

J writes: "So entertaining! The 'lucid waking' premise is terrific, and I LOVE the concept of your appearing only in stained-glass lighting (and, of course, carrying the windows around!!). And then the way the hilarious recursiveness paradigm morphs into a salad bar, hahahaha! (Oh, and you're really rocking the fedora, by the way.) Bravo!!"

George writes: "What a f#$#%$g  treat this clip was!! Loved the sliding in and out of reality both in script and video. Great structure leading us in, adding the glitches that woke us up, creating the shock of a non-mirrored reflection except for the ?, and then diving into what that means and leaving us with a haunting last image. Brilliant!"

G writes: "Oh my! The visual and SFX in this are great! Loved the little echoes and jumps; timed perfectly. The mirror writing was unexpected and fun, and the ¿ definition was the perfect ending (complete with old school incremental zoom steps on your shocked face!). I love that you’re getting some good mileage out of the haunted mirror, and I enjoyed using it to reflect the window, which of course is symmetrical, so it nicely foreshadowed the ending.  Oh, and finally, the title of the video on YouTube is, of course, so up-to-date. I laughed out loud and how well, sadly, it fits into the moment.  Thanks, I enjoyed it!"

From The Dead Shall Be Raised, by George Bellairs:

***

He lived in the past and his memory in this respect was wide, precise and boring.

***

[Not quite a full-fledged silly name, imo, but a "slightly silly" one--along the lines of the Pythons' Slightly Silly political party.]

Mr. Benjamin Butterworth

***

Of the old firm of Butterworth, Coughey, Mills, Butterworth and Mills, Solicitors, only Mr. Simeon Mills survived. This was somewhat of a public relief, for previously, nobody had known which Butterworth was which in the firm's title and as for the other Mills, he might have been the invisible man; no-one ever knew or saw him.

***

[The residents of an insular village] spoke freely to each other, but answered "foreigners" in monosyllables, as though suspecting that any friendly gestures would result in the strangers taking the liberty of marrying into their families and removing their closely-guarded building-society deposits into alien communities.

***

She... grumbled that it wasn't long since the meter-man was there before.

"Yes. We're getting a bit ahead of ourselves at the gas-works," said Blades. "If we go on like this, we'll be meeting ourselves coming back!"

***

[Descriptions that compare people to eggs never get old for me.]

Enthroned among the rest of the customers sat a portly man, with a bald head, like an egg thrusting itself from a deep, stiff collar. He was the mortgagee of the premises and came regularly every day to eat two boiled eggs, which, in their white cups, looked like small replicas of him. Now and then, he would raise his eyes, which were like cloudy-grey poached eggs, from his plate and scan the place critically, as though putting the whole lot under the auctioneer's hammer then and there.

***

[Bonus: A reference to "flatulent Eccles cakes," which of course make me imagine an indignant reaction from the Goons (whom this book predates).]

If you land a hand and realize it's just a baby's, or it's not in season, here are tips for throwing it back:

1. Don't wear it out by playing with it too much before you land it.

2. Leave it in the water and never touch it with dry hands.

3. Gently remove the hook so as to prevent crushing.

4. Cut the line if the hook won't come out.

5. Don't actually throw it back, as that may cause harm or even kill it.  If it is in shock from being caught, gently move it back and forth in the water to help the fingers to spread.

Our illustration is from Lustige Blätter, 1908.

"Knowing what I now know, he left out some crucial information of the events of that morning."

—Darlene Bloome Mishek, My Doctor the Psychopath

Perhaps Archie McPhee might revive this classic trend: gargoyle tongues and shaggy mustaches as anklets.  From Encyclopédie Méthodique, Recueil d'Antiquités, Deuxième Partie, 1804.  Courtesy of La Biblioteca Universitaria de Sevilla.

You already knew "there's no i in team."  But did you ever notice the i in me?  The I In Me by Cynthia Cox, 2011.

From Lustige Blätter, 1915.

From Kladderadatsch, 1928.

Pigs doing everything.  From Fliegende Blätter, 1928.

From a bookplate found in Hieroglyphics by Arthur Machen, 1902.

"A fairy palace, with a fairy garden; inside the trolls dwell, working at their magic forges, making and making always things rare and strange." —Charles Kingsley

"The boy flying away in the moonlight."  From Autumn Leaves by Christie Crust, 1875.

From Jugend, 1908.   For a non-alcoholic window into the world of the wee folk, see How to Believe in Your Elf.

Fighting off the grim reaper with an umbrella.  From Satirikon, 1908.

If I had a nickle for how many times she … "Often speaks of those years spent amongst the peasantry."  From The Idler, 1894.

A snore, done in by a slipper thrown at a nose, turns into a ghost and cries, "Ce-ce-guggle-glug!"  From Sayings and Doings in America by Costard Sly, 1834.

Reblog to wish this tree a viridescent spring.  From Lustige Blätter, 1915.

Here is revealed the secret of how we get our very own books (see the list here) to look so fabulous.  From Jugend, 1929.

"Then suddenly something came flopping down."  From Fairy Tales from the Far North by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, 1897.

"Weird phantoms of the air."  From Popular Mechanics, 1927.

"The haunted bachelor."  From Welcome Guest, 1860.

From La Baïonnette, 1917.

From the remarkable Caws-Elwitts:

Hilary dreamt that she had a dentist appointment in Skaneateles (a place we've never been in real life). While trying to find the office she ended up in a parking garage, where a security guard yelled at her for walking down the automotive ramp. But then they became fast friends, she met his whole family, and he politely corrected her pronunciation of "Skaneateles."

I dreamt that Edgar Allan Poe carried a small red volume of his poetry with him when he was a dinner guest. He was (in the dream) an expert on silver spoons, and he would sometimes absent-mindedly place one of the hosts' little spoons that he'd been examining inside his poetry book in the midst of conversation, and innocently walk off with it. There were known to be several real-life (in the dream) "mysteries" of missing spoons that had later been accounted for by scholars familiar with Poe's habits.

Hilary also dreamt:

1. She was walking around brainstorming a novel, carrying a "plagiarism bucket." This was an orange-colored receptacle into which she would toss each new idea (on a slip of paper on which she'd jotted it down); inside the bucket, the paper would turn a particular color, litmus-style, if she had inadvertently lifted that particular idea from a pre-existing work.

2. Someone (who was possibly Julian Barnes) was friends with both me and Hilary but for some reason insisted on socializing with us separately. So he would have lunch with me at a restaurant, after which I would leave and Hilary would take my place. JB (or whoever) would then eat a second lunch with Hilary.

Rollerblades have been traced back to 1819, but this illustration may spur you to consider an even earlier origin.  From Nebelspalter, 1958.

From The Case of the Dangerous Dowager, by Erle Stanley Gardner:

***

"I've already been employed by some client whose interests are adverse to yours. If you don't tell me anything, you won't have anything to regret later on."

"Spoken like a gentleman," Duncan said.

"No," Mason corrected, "spoken like a lawyer."