"Beyond the veil."  From The Instructor, 1968.  See The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine.

From The Orange Fairy Book by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H. J. Ford, 1906.

"All the trumpets sounded for him on the Other Side."  From The Children's Newspaper, 1943.

From Visions Beyond the Veil by H. A. Baker, 1973.

We're honored by this review of our collection of 112 spooky cocktail recipes, Of Drinking in Remembrance of the Dead:

Here's a toast to the dead from the book.  The text reads:

This toast was passed down to us from the Omar Khayyam Society, 1921:

To those who have passed beyond the veil that hides the Infinite, and solved the last great mystery of life.  In enduring memory of these friends and comrades we annually, with humble and contrite hearts, in solemn appreciation of the glorious beauties of their lives, speak the seven hundred-year-old lament of Omar in FitzGerald’s magnificent rendering:

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup and Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.

A Journey From This World to the Next, &c. by Henry Fielding, 1743.

We now formally introduce our repository of ghostly images that were never meant to be. The specters were conjured unwittingly, through a mechanical process of book scanning. Their portraits technically do not exist, except within this context. To explain: in old books, frontispieces were typically protected by a sheet of translucent tissue paper. So thorough is the Google Books scanning process that even this page of tissue paper is scanned. The figure in the plate beneath the tissue—"beyond the veil,” as it were—emerges as from a foggy otherworld. The frontispieces were never meant to be seen this way. Their wraithlike manifestations have been artificially "fixed" in time by the scanning process. In essence, timeless phantasms of dead writers have been captured and bound into a new age.

And so we call this phenomenon "unforeseen art," as it constitutes an aesthetic expression without original intent. Just as artists often credit their inspiration to a Muse, the accidental art herein is in the domain of real ghosts; every author here has departed to the Other Side. We call it "necromancy by proxy," as the scanning machine serves as our "spirit medium" or shaman.

See The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine.

~ The Veil ~

Portrait from Illustrations of the Author of Waverley.

"O You who unveils the hidden, reveal to me the secret of this.” —Simcha Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife