An illustration from an 1888 issue of Punch magazine.

An illustration from an 1842 issue of Punch magazine.

"You may be quite surprised at how much you can get for that old painting that's been sitting in the attic for years."
—Green Your Home All in One For Dummies (2009)

Librarians have acquired tastes.  (That's a Googlewhack, but surely the joke's been done?)

(Thanks to New Hampshire's Keene Public Library for acquiring our Tarot of Portmeirion.  We can hardly imagine a lovelier home for the deck than a Victorian mansion!)

An illustration from an 1879 issue of Punch magazine.

Exactly one-hundred years before the giant dragonfly's debut in Monster on the Campus, these monstrosities appeared in Punch (1858).

"The Unknown Bull": an illustration from an 1862 issue of Punch magazine.

This is the best rendition of a giraffe jumping off an elephant into a crocodile's mouth that we've seen all year.  From Punch, 1858.

"Sensational.  I knew somebody would come up with the right word."  A still from the classic sitcom Bewitched, season six.

An illustration from an 1856 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "Every Lady Her Own Perambulator."

"You should always remember that society isn't always all that it's cracked up to be."
—Patrick W. McDermott, The Memoirs of the Walrus (2010)

"Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings." —Charlotte Brontë, Villette

The spirit of the teapot: an illustration from an 1862 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "Now then, I'm ready if you are..."

"Unless you have heard it yourself you may find it hard to believe that the woodcock, that long-billed, bug-eyed eater of earthworms, can sing a song as sweet as a nightingale's."
—Field & Stream (April 1972)

"Battle of the Alphabet": an illustration from an 1843 issue of Punch magazine.

"I think someone realized it would only be funny if it was clear that the spelling error was intentional."
—John Gierach, Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders (2001)

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, acclaimed for tirelessly demonstrating an effervescent mastery of the agreeably diverting traditions, offers this quip:

[No man is an island: we picture below an octopal Aleutian.]

"You would have had to be there, and even then it'd only be funny if you'd been drinking."
—Paul Alan Fahey, The Other Man (2013)

You've heard the old saying that one catches more flies with honey, but the truth is that one catches more flies with reconnaissance.  An illustration from an 1856 issue of Punch magazine.

An illustration from an 1856 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "The very idea of work [in] this beautiful weather is repugnant to my feelings."

"A model hieroglyphic with sure prophecies for the next hundred years": from Punch, 1848.

"You may be quite surprised at the pleasant sounds you are making."
—Shelley Katsh & Carol Merle-Fishman, The Music Within You (1985)

An illustration from an 1888 issue of Punch magazine.

An illustration from an 1848 issue of Punch magazine.

"A rose is a rose because it has the principle of 'rose' and not the principle of 'fork.'"
—Lee Dian Rainey, Confucius and Confucianism: The Essentials (2010)

The fine line between a Leitmotiv and an addiction.
—Nein Quarterly

[A previous post, updated.]

"You are a vampire.  You look into the mirror and see yourself.  You then realize that you are the reflection, and the vampire can't see you." —Tenuous Pun

Prof. Oddfellow checks for fangs in a vampire mirror in Los Feliz, California.

A precursor to Jerry slicing Tom in half, in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon: an illustration from an 1862 issue of Punch magazine.

"The skeleton key to getting to know ourselves is the discovery that we can get to know ourselves on many levels."
—Jerry Stocking

Riding the skeleton key into the garden of forking paths, from Punch, 1852.

"Why do you always look so sad when you look at the sea, Wenna?"  (Cornhill, 1875.)

   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(   ,(
`-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `

Over a century before the famous finale of Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: an illustration from an 1862 issue of Punch magazine.

"It's really happening. I mean, up until now, it seemed like a dream, but ... it's really happening."
—Nancy Thelen, Lost and Found (2011)

Here's a precursor to the thrice great Charles Fort, on humankind being ghosts:

An illustration from an 1890 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "Death and his brother Sleep."

"Throw underlings to the wolves while the top dogs hide behind the ramparts."
—Paul W. Rea, Mounting Evidence (2011)

"Nested lucid dreamers, when observed in a mirror, are reversed not only right to left, but dream to dream." —Jeff Hawkins

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

An illustration from an 1890 issue of Punch magazine.

During a visit to the Yale University Art Gallery, the scalawag Jonathan Caws-Elwitt gave an impromptu tour of the muses:

1. The Muse of Getting High and Really Digging That Ping-Pong Ball.

An illustration from an 1890 issue of Punch magazine.

Hackers deleted our photographic proof that a blurry harvest moon perfectly lines up with the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and enigmatic smile of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.  [The only good that comes of hacker deletions is that we're shown we're truly onto something ... something perhaps too "dangerous" for the zeitgeist!]  We have restored our proof here:

https://www.oneletterwords.com/weblog/?id=3018

To paraphrase José Ortega Y Gasset, when we hear a unicorn, it is the unicorn that is present and evident, not our hearing it.  We do not hear our hearing when we are listening.  In order to realize that there is such a thing as our hearing, we have to stop listening and remember that a moment ago we were hearing.  We hear our hearing when we are outside it, when it is not immediate to us, when the reality with which it had to do -- hearing the unicorn -- is reality no longer, but rather we are in another reality which we call 'remembering a past event': recalling that we heard a unicorn.  To those who think that unicorns are not real, we reply that what we think is never reality; a thought doesn't and can't think itself -- a thought, far from being fundamental reality, is no more than an invention -- something hypothetical or theoretical.  To truly know unicorns, it is necessary to subtract all of that which has been thought, to realize that the reality of unicorns is always different from that which is thought.  In a nutshell, the pre-intellectual executive act consists in the coexistence of oneself with unicorns.

An illustration from an 1871 issue of Punch magazine.

"The Incantation": an illustration from an 1890 issue of Punch magazine.

Both the origin of the world and its inner truth are unknowable.
—Damascius' treatise on the beginning of things

"There are times you may be quite surprised, or even blindsided, by situations that you did not predict."
—John B. Montgomery, Great from the Start (2012)

An illustration from an 1890 issue of Punch magazine.

We think he is only half joking: an illustration from an 1855 issue of Punch magazine.

We dug up a quotation to help explain the illustration (from Punch, 1842):

"Many scholars do not use the term 'doll' for the ritual figures used by adult women, due to a belief that this association with children's toys trivializes the ritual figures." —Philip M. Peek, African Folklore: An Encyclopedia

"The Demon Alps": an illustration from an 1890 issue of Punch magazine.

"Always remember that another person is not you, for that other person knows too well that you are different from him."
—Marcus Garvey, Message to the People (1986)

An illustration from a 1901 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The headline reads: "Insight."

Here's a Darwinian ancestor from Punch, 1887.

But did you know that we demonstrate how you can trace your own ancestry to this creature in our book Heirs to the Queen of Hearts?

An illustration from an 1887 issue of Puck magazine.

"You can only be funny if people let you but you can always be a fool."
—Ken Willidau, An Off Day in My World's Fair: (A Self-Amusement Park) (2010)

Here's a precursor to a memorable scene from Best in Show: "We could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about."  The caption reads, "Having our choice between nothing to say, and the excess."  From Cornhill magazine, 1871.

A maledicta machine: an illustration from a 1900 issue of Punch magazine.

"You may find it hard to believe, but there is an answer to the high price of gasoline."
—Popular Mechanics (March 1983)

An illustration by Raphael Kirchner from a 1916 issue of Puck magazine.

Here's a precursor to the signature "Be seeing you" sign in the cult television series The Prisoner.  It's from Colliers magazine, May 17, 1919.

From our former outpost at Twitter:

"It’s as if we believe gravity is real & unicorns are not. ... How damaged our belief systems are."
—http://library.hrmtc.com/2013/09/03/the-alchemy-of-storytelling/

This puzzle grid contains several big words. Can you find them?

• 7-letter words: 7
• 8-letter words: 3

All letters in the word must touch (in any direction), and no square may be reused.

Click to display solutions

An illustration from a 1906 issue of Puck magazine.

Note the astonishing typographic art in this mangled scan from Google Books.  The scanner's fingers have been transformed into textual kaleidoscopes.  The page in question is from Cornhill magazine, 1865.

We're delighted to present to you "The Sum of Human Knowledge," from a 1917 issue of Puck magazine.  What more could we add?

"A rose is a rose . . . except when you're shopping for flowers for your wedding. Then a 'bridal' rose is suddenly eight times more expensive than a regular rose." —Denise Fields, Bridal Bargains (2010)

Here's a precursor to the 3D printing (additive manufacturing) process, from Cornhill magazine, 1883.  We see that the more things tech, the more they stay the same.

An illustration from an 1859 issue of Punch magazine.

From our blog dedicated to magic words and symbols spotted in the wild:

The Lord of Misrule, magician/comedian Tommy Cooper, sometimes intoned an "incomprehensible incantation of dubious foreign extraction that might have been spelled 'Zhhzhhzhhzhh,' but probably wasn't" (John Fisher, Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing, 2006, p. 6).

[Thanks, Jonathan!]

About seventy years before Hemingway debuted The Old Man and the Sea, we find the story of "The Old Woman of the Sea" in Cornhill magazine, 1883.

"Look at the events in your dreams symbolically, not literally, and you may be quite surprised by the wisdom you find."
—Mind Over Money: How to Program Your Mind For Wealth

This illustration from Cornhill (1880) isn't especially remarkable except for the fact that it depicts one of those decisive moments in which everything is changed.  (Frederic Tuten is a master at handling such turning points; see his Self Portraits: Fictions.)

An illustration from an 1856 issue of Punch magazine.

The conclusion of the "hermit's" fragments, from Punch, 1842.