An illustration from Legal and Other Lyrics by George Outram (1887).  The caption reads: "Oh! what a deevil, &c."

"That sail will never put you under the water again."  Or, to quote Jeremiah 21:10, "And he shall burn it with fire."

Here's how to imbue majesty into something as ordinary as a library stamp.  (We find this majestic library stamp in the Commercial Intelligence Journal, 1921.)

Aaron Tucker has created this amazing site, Chessbard which translates chess games into poetry. You can play classic games, play a game against a chessbot, or modify games. The site then 'translates' the game into poems: both a White poem and a Black poem. Aaron has also written an essay about the project and its development.

I was delighted to be able to contribute to the site. I created some poems (by modifying a classic game) and wrote a discussion about what I did and about chess in general. Read it here.

Really fascinating.

And while you're thinking about chess, definitely check out the very lovely, Calvino-Chess Dictionary by Craig Conley. You can buy the book or read it online. I'd recommend the book!

"The turquoise skull was on the table, and seated before it was my poor friend—dead!"  From The Dwarf's Chamber and Other Stories by Fergus Hume, 1896.

From Pictures of the Chinese, Drawn by Themselves, by Robert Henry Cobbold, 1860.

"If round my footsteps dwell unholy sign or evil spell," from The Misfortunes of Elphin by Thomas Love Peacock, 1897.

An illustration from The Oxford Thackeray.

"It was Edward ..." but now it's Mister Ed, eh?  From Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, 1896.

From The Pyrenees by Henry George Blackburn, 1867.

"Doing Skye": an illustration from Our Journey to the Hebrides by Joseph Pennell and Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1890).

"Life's Mystery": an illustration from The Works of Henry Rose (1890).

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world?  It is that we have only known the back of the world.  We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.  That is not a tree, but the back of a tree.  That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud.  Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face?  If we could only get round in front." —G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Here's a precursor to the puppet that lives within us all, from Modern Magic by Professor Hoffmann, 1885.

From Matthew Flinders by Robert Thynne, 1896.  The text reads, "Behind this hand neither land nor strand.  Jim's discovery in the ice plain."  

From The Works of Charles Dickens, Household Edition.

An illustration from Poems by Charles Rosher (1897).

An illustration from The Sphinx-like Head by J. Harry Sugden (1896).  The caption reads: "With a loud shout of joy from me, and a despairing shriek from her, I hurled her down the crater."

An illustration from The Burgess Nonsense Book (1901).