This vintage Colgate ad (from 1873) reminds us that we know our own teeth only through the looking glass!

"The chaplain puzzled," from The Oxford Thackeray.

To quote Thelma Ritter in the film Boeing-Boeing, "It's not easy, you know?"  We dedicate more hours a day than one might believe going through books digitized by Google, the British Library, and the Internet Archive, and we curate imagery that strikes our fancy, but then we take all said imagery into Photoshop to undo the various damage from the original scanning process: we correct contrast, sharpness, color balance, and trimming, and we try our best to erase digitizing artifacts that don't belong.  And it's all just for the love of it.  Granted we did include a particularly glamorous category of our finds in the book Ghost in the Scanning Machine, but the vast, vast majority of the pieces are just for here and our blog on Tumblr.  Thanks for the appreciation!  We suppose many folks just assume we stumble upon all this material, but in fact it's all hand-picked with painstaking care (with the marvelous side effect of boosting our time travel abilities).

Below, Prof. Oddfellow reveals one of the many tools* he uses to create Abecedarian — a mysterious genie bottle that arrived in the mail one day.

"The pursuit of knowledge under difficulties," from Prison Life in the South During the Years 1864 and 1865 by A. O. Abbott, 1865.

The question isn't so much "who wrote the book of love" as "who burned it."  From Favourite English Poems and Poets, 1870.

"You need not squeeze my hand so," from The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray and illustrated by Chris Hammond, 1898.

This is also a precursor to the MGM film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).  From Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.

"Harry! Tom!"

"Dick! Tom!"

"Tom! Harry!"

"Stop!" cried Dick suspiciously; and, taking out a sheet of white paper, he wrote down: "Harry! Tom!" "Dick! Tom!" and "Tom! Harry!" He then added them together and divided through by Tom.

Here's some "peachafication" (though we'd have spelled it with an I: peachification) from the hilarious series Schitt's Creek starring Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara.

Which came first, the world of typewriter art or the, um, art of the typewriter world?  Our illustration of the typewriter world appears as an ad in Rod and Gun, 1891.

Q: Do I look like I'm made of money?

Some musical notation from Femmes Vengées, Ou Les Feintes Infidelites by François-André Danican Philidor, 1775.

Here's a precursor to "No means no."  The caption reads, "'Does that mean, No?' Mr. Henley called after him."  From Blind Love by Wilkie Collins and illustrated by A. Forestier, 1890.

Yes -- here's a precursor to the Pac-Man ghost surrounded by -- what else? -- pac-dots/pellets, from Histoire de Saint-Chamond by James Jean Pierre Condamin, 1890.

We commonly use Latin words, known as Lorem Ipsum, as dummy text, but back in the day, simple chicken scratch sufficed.  Our illustration appears in The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere, 1851.