We were asked just today, in a random encounter, how we came up with a thousand definitions for our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.  We had to make up an answer, because the truth verges on unbelievable.  From North Texas' 1918 yearbook.

The guy on the right swears he's not drunk but rather has been searching for a bottle for the last eight hours.  From Cine-Mundial, 1944.

"Time goes, you say.  Oh no!  Alas.  Time stays, we go."  From East Pilgrim's 1964 yearbook.

"Disengage yourself at oncely; this seat are occupied."  From the Ellendale yearbook of 1915.

There were once so many Shakespearean actors that the news catered to them.  This is true in at least one parallel universe.  The headline reads, "Former courting customs should interest 'Romeos.'"  From The Kentucky Kernel, 1953.

From Punch Magazine (1888).

This tie shop welcomes Jekylls & Hydes and schizophrenics, and it calls its salesmen psychiatrists.  From Daily Tar Heel, 1946.  

From Lustige Blätter, 1918.

From Jugend, 1900.

From the University of Rhode Island's yearbook of 1913.

"God knows where we are, the real us.  Heaven or hell, I suppose, or simply gone."

Here's a precursor to "the question mark of Damocles" (Saul Tanpepper, Occupied).  From North Texas' 1918 yearbook.

That's exactly my question when I look at visitor traffic stats for this blog -- "Are there really people in this room?"  From Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum, 1908.

Today's giant clown dumping tiny people out of a building is from Washington University's 1909 yearbook.

You've heard the idiom "crying into one's beer," but absinthe cries by itself.  From Nebelspalter, 1910.

Memories of college.  From Elizabethtown's 1972 yearbook.

From Jeeves and the King of Clubs, by Ben Schott:

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I knew for a fact that the dinner jacket in which he was currently attired had been bespoken on Savile Row, no less, for I was with him at its bespeaking.

***

And here he was, in the flesh, leaning against my mantelpiece like an elongated exclamation mark.

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He gave me a look of pure hatred; the kind of look a cat might give having been prematurely let out of a bag.

***

As before, Lord MacAuslan was elongated against a mantelpiece like a prime example of Euclidean geometry.

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Lord MacAuslan shot me a knowing look. For want of anything better to do, I shot one right back.

***

The Colonel harrumphed, a noise I had hitherto encountered only in novels.

***

Not only was the lark on the wing and the snail on the thorn--comme par ordinaire--but as far as the eye could see every other member of the animal kingdom was suitably conjoined with its appropriate poetical appurtenance.

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She had the no-nonsense look of one who, when the mood took her, was prepared to indulge a certain amount of nonsense.

***

"I suppose [flying a plane is] devilishly complicated?"

"Can you drive a car?"

"I can. Is it much like driving a car?"

"Not really, now I think about it."

***

"That Vandyke of his follows you round the room like the eyes in an oil painting."

***

Aunt Dahlia's floral melange resembled nothing less than a crayon scrawl of a scarecrow's funeral drawn by an insolent child.

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Lambert Lyall is one of those curious old shops even Dickens would have called Dickensian.

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As we descended to the front door, I was assailed by a qualm, assuming such things are sold to the public in the singular.

***

"To the castle of the sleepy king."  From The Sleepy King by Aubrey Hopwood and Seymour Hicks, 1900.

"A thick vapour arose, and the fantastic form swayed to and fro behind it."  From The Idler, 1906.

From Punch (1861).

We spotted this ghost posing for a portrait in the Ohio yearbook of 1992.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

Our custom widget that checks for duplicated images suggested this unlikely pairing.  Click each image for its source.

From Kladderadatsch, 1922.

Scandal.  From The Judge, 1915.

What do these cats have to do with a yearbook?  Well, a tabby named Tom Terrific earned his medical degree in 1972.  From Medical College of Virginia's 1972 yearbook.

From Atta Troll by Heinrich Heine and illustrated by Willy Pogány, 1914.

From The Word, 1907.

From L'Impartial de l'Est, 1904.  See Your Ship Will Come In.

Reblog if you, too, have been supplied with fire water from within a kangaroo's pouch.  From Muhlenberg's 1950 yearbook.

From Le Pêle-Mêle, 1896.

Our custom widget that checks for duplicated images suggested this unlikely pairing.  Click each image for its source.

An early Dr. Suess piece, reprinted from Judge in Le Journal Amusant, 1932.

There is an ancient folk belief that effigies possess souls of their own.  The belief isn't baseless.  From the University of Rhode Island's yearbook of 1962.

From The Rotunda newspaper of Longwood College, 1971.

From Montclair's 1977 yearbook.

Pushed into a nightmarish sea of grinning mathematical monsters.  From Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1936.

It would be more disturbing to encounter scary clowns in old yearbooks if old yearbooks didn't already frighten us so very much.  From William and Mary's 1974 yearbook. 

From the Etownian, 1958.

Reblog if you've done a cake walk for a wizard.  From L'Impartial de l'Est, 1904.

"Need directions, always ask a ghost."

—Tim Powers, Expiration Date

"Together … alone."  From the Worcester yearbook of 1966.

You've heard of "silent pictures," but talkies are mute, too.  From Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, "Music and the Film," in Marxism and Art (1973).

From Lustige Blätter, 1918.

Here's one way people can become ghosts when a yearbook gets scanned.  To understand this, see The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine.   See also How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

From the Michiganensian yearbook, 1911.

The geometric rogues' gallery.  From The Judge, 1921.

Our custom widget that checks for duplicated images suggested this unlikely pairing.  Click each image for its source.