I found a pressed 6-leaf clover hiding in an expensive rare book.  A few years ago, I purchased, for an exorbitant $128, what was promised (original typo: primrosed) to be the most unusual travel account ever published -- the surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun's exploration of the eerie magic of the Irish countryside, The Crying of the Wind.  (It hadn't yet been republished in softcover; I was a year too early!)  I'd been sufficiently impressed by Colquhoun's dreamy occult novel Goose of Hermogenes to trust that the travel book would beguile me.  It did!  And though I can't help but wonder why the Universe tricked me into spending $128 just before the softcover came out, I do know that a new softcover wouldn't have had a pressed 6-leaf clover, so perhaps it all somehow works out in the end.

The Phantom Friend by Margaret Sutton.

The Brightener by Alice Muriel Williamson & Charles Norris Williamson, 1921.

A Disillusioned Occultist by Charles Edward Barns, 1889.

Felix Fontaine's Golden Wheel Fortune Teller and Dream Book, 1862.

Spell-Bound by M. A. Bird, 1865.

The Voices of the Stars by James Edward Walker, 1894.

The Haunted Fountain by Margaret Sutton.

The Vanishing Shadow by Margaret Sutton.

When we've been a stranger in town, we've not felt invisible.  But we weren't consulted on this book cover design.  Stranger in Town by Robert Bloomfield.  (Book cover via 54mge.)

Light in Darkness by Sarah Robinson, 1876.

William Zorach's cover design for Mushrooms by Alfred Kreymborg, 1916.

The author of It Always Rains on Sunday reveals that It Was Christmas Every Day.  By this logic, it always rains on Christmas.  While that goes against common sense, the reasoning is sound.

Theosophy Or Christianity, Which? by Isaac Massey Haldeman, 1893.

Eight question marks and a skull — the cover of a set of John Dickson Carr mystery novels.

Fair and Fatal Warnings, or, Visits from the World of Spirits; Being Concise Relations of the Most Curious and Remarkable Apparitions, Ghosts, Spectres, and Visions, 1810.

You've heard of spinning yarns about ghosts, but some such yarns come directly "from the loom of the dead," as we learn in The Shape of Fear, and Other Ghostly Tales by Elia Wilkinson Peattie, 1898.

Here's a title page that wonders about the identity of its own author.  Plus, note the genre, which is our own personal favorite: "serio-ludicro, tragico-comico."

If you can't say, "I lava you," it's not a volcanic romance.  From The Phantom CIty, A Volcanic Romance by William Westall, 1886.