"Cheer up," from 1912.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click for two more versions of this card.

"The Tourist's Book of Welsh Place-Names."  Date indecipherable.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to shift from 1849 to 1895.

You've heard of "the diminishing size of the typewriter market" (over at Wikipedia's entry on the Smith Corona), and it's true: it's the market that got small, not the typewriter.  The caption to this postcard reads: "The 14-ton giant Underwood Master operating daily at the New York World's Fair 1939."

The pancake hub of the universe -- it may sound farfetched, yet physics posits a "cosmic pancake scenario" (composed of unrelaxed superclusters aligned along strings in which galaxies and clusters of galaxies are embedded, as per Schaeffer & Silk's "Large-Scale Inhomogeneities and Galaxy Statistics"), and in Buddhism, a cosmic pancake is one of the fundamental elements of the universe (see Chogyam Trungpa's Journey Without Goal, p. 137).  Ironically, once you reach the Pancake Hub of the Universe in Liberal, Kansas, "you're not in Kansas anymore."

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to shift the sun.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to uncensor the three maidens forming a skull face.
From 1910

Here's the obsolescence of the timber line at Mt. Hood.

Can you find what's wrong in this picture?  If your eye went directly to the table cloth, think again.  It's the way this Clearwater Beach, Florida restaurant subliminally encouraged diners to order an ice cream cone for dessert.  In this diabolical mind-control technique, a diner first thinks, "I feel like I'm being watched," but by the time the main course is cleared away, the anxiety seeks a practical recipe for relief: "I feel like an ice cream cone for dessert."  

"A woman causes the ups and downs (in life)"- a theatrical card scanned by the Boston Public Library.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to reveal the painted version.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to see another version.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to bring on the night.

Here's a precursor to the phenomeon of people not writing back.  Date uncertain.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to reveal the larger version.

"I'm haying a ___ of a time in Coney Island."  Date uncertain.

INSTRUCTIONS: Click to change the light.

"'Crystal Geyser' near Green River, Utah," circa 1940.