We visited the land of frozen suns, and the locals all thought it was a gorgeous day and were getting ice cream cones, and we were like, "But it's effing freezing!"

From The Divine Plan of the Ages as Shown in the Great Pyramid by Charles Taze Russell, 1886.

With all the book covers that force us to read between the lines (see exhibits 1-4), we can't read exhibit 5's mind because the title looks like it ought to scan as, "Can't Read Mind Why You My."

Last we checked, softcovers of this were going for nearly a thousand dollars: Curses, Hexes, & Spells by Daniel Cohen.

Cocktails: How to Mix Them. From 1922.  See Of Drinking in Remembrance of the Dead.

Last we checked, the hardcover of this one was approaching a thousand dollars: A Queer Kind of Death by George Baxt, 1966.

Last we checked, the hardcover of this book was nearly $900 on Amazon: Letters From the Dead by Campbell Black (our restoration of a poor scan).

From The Mermaid's Message by Ruth Bishop, 1919.

From Full of Fun by Dean Rivers, George Thatcher, and Henry Firth Wood, 1921.

What a concise way to communicate a title, year, edition number, publisher, city, editor's name, and ten major contributors.  That's sixteen units of information!  From Wheels by Edith Sitwell, 1916.

Good news -- it won't and actually cannot ever happen again.  From It Never Can Happen Again by William de Morgan, 1909.

Last we checked, this book is going for over a thousand dollars on Amazon.  From In City and Country by Nila Banton Smith, 1938.

From Psychic Light by Maud Lord-Drake, 1904.

We concur: the most direct way to see the wizard is to mount a carousel horse.  Our own favorite antique carousel is on the Santa Monica pier.

From Off to See the Wizard by Daniel Ort, 1975.

Those still wondering which came first, the chicken or the egg, aren't reading the right books.

The Dogs and the Fleas was written by a dog named Frederic Scrimshaw in 1893.

The setting mapped on the endpapers is even divided into acres, as in "the Hundred Acre Wood," in this rather blatant "tribute" to Winnie the Pooh, two decades later.  We decoded the young reader's squiggle.  It says, "Christopher Robin did it first."  From Poo and the Baby Bunny Rabbit by Edwin Megargee, 1947.

This cursed image appears in Gaston's 1975 yearbook.

It's been said that "The author should be invisible every step of the way" (Angela Ackerman).  And that includes the title page, apparently.  This page is exactly as scanned by Google Books: "The Works of."