"Third trip of the unabridged [dictionary, pictured flying through the air]," from Roughing It by Mark Twain.

Inspired by the caption of this illustration from The Quiver, 1878, here's an alternative to the phrase, "As I live and breathe!": "As I stand and read!"

Here's a precursor by many decades to the useless information craze, from a 1909 issue of Puck magazine.  The caption reads: "Piffle's Cyclopedia of Useless Information."

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"One loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they've always been there." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

An illustration from an 1883 issue of Punch magazine.

One hundred and thirty-four years before C. S. Lewis published a demonic exchange in The Screwtape Letters, we were invited to listen in on an Infernal Conference or, Dialogues of Devils (1808).

We say this in infinite jest: here's a precursor to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1,088 pages), from Punch, 1853.

Geof Huth told us that he just acquired an uncorrected proof of One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, the first in a collection of uncorrected dictionary proofs.  We're now hoping that O.L.W.'s proof is riddled with errors and constitutes a wicked reference like The Wicked Bible of 1631 (though that one, if memory serves, is merely missing a "not" in one of the Commandments).  We love the idea of uncorrected proofs deliberately being cited as [faulty] evidence.  We didn't think to tell Geof this, but we're picturing an entire research project in which every single footnote references an uncorrected proof.  No one has any reason to know this, but when we appeared at O.L.W. book signings/talks, we read favorite one-letter words from the uncorrected proof.  Our talks were technically illegitimate, springing from liminal matter that wasn't quite the "thing" itself.  We didn't do it as some sort of art piece (more fool we) but were merely caught between worlds: a reclusive writer publicly reading from a softcover of a hardcover to people listening but not buying any of it.

An illustration from a 1908 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "A strange new light would shine out of its pages."

"A book is a version of the world.  If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
—Salman Rushdie

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."
—Salman Rushdie

An illustration from an 1858 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "Smuggled candy in school; smoked cigars, and—oh, fie!—read a great many very queer books on the sly."

Dedicated to Teresa Burritt.

Xenagorabibliomania: an obsessive curiosity about the books that strangers read in open spaces (Nick Hornby).

"It is far too easy to talk of a dead author behind the backs of his books."
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."
—Salman Rushdie

All kidding aside, there's a book entitled What Shall I Read Next?  We can just see this title scrawled (without irony) on someone's list of to-be-read books.  (Even more deliciously, as we type this post, the book has not yet been released but is pre-orderable.)  It's like something out of a procrastinator's Calvinoesque dream.