"Be a very great writer of very little books."  From The Boyd Smith Mother Goose, 1920.

A tip on how to confuse Death in the 11th hour.  Note the rare word longeval and how Beadle puts the yes in yes'erday.  

From Lyrics of the Under World by Samuel Alfred Beadle, 1912.

A word of warning from a clown: "Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle!  Look out, look sharp for Mother Goose; she's in the air, she's everywhere, and I fear she's wandering loose."  From Wesleyan College's 1911 yearbook.

A preface obscured by the author's spectacles.  From Sharp Eyes, written and illustrated by William Hamilton Gibson, 1898.

A preface explaining why readers should keep any errors they discover to themselves.  From Where the World Ends by A. A. Henley, 1911.

Here's what "preface" actually means.  From Ohio State University's 1894 yearbook.

Apparently, nothing written about Ireland can be called fiction, since "Ireland is an unreal place anyway, where the unlikely seems to happen more often than anything else."  From Mrs. O' by Claude Marie Forde, 1958. 

Here's how to tell when a preface isn't a preface.  From King Longbeard, Or Annals of the Golden Dreamland by Barrington MacGregor and illustrated by Charles Robinson, 1897.

Great instruction on how to use a book!  This one must be read in bed and must not be borrowed.  For a double bed, buy two.  From Mince Pie by Christopher Morley, 1919.

From Eli Perkins (at Large), His Sayings and Doings by Melville De Lancey Landon, 1875.  (Via Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.)

The author reveals that his aim in the book is to kill a passing moment.  From Quips and Cranks by Thomas Hood, 1861.

There are possible readers of books not yet printed, and here's part of a preface to them.  From Ixora, A Mystery by John Harrison, 1888.

Here's an author's apology for letting a couple of fairies slip into the pages of her book.  From The Primrose Ring by Ruth Sawyer, 1915.   See How to Believe in Your Elf.

Here's a conversation of a preface in which the author mentally has a line and the reader does, too.  From Ghost Stories and Phantom Fancies by Hain Friswell, 1858.

We checked under a microscope, and this volume really could be described as the result of a "fortuitous concurrence of atoms."  From Recess Studies, 1870.

Here's a book entitled Green Peas, along with the explanation.

The anonymous author of Whose Poems? (1850) asks his possibly phantasmagorical reader to be kind.  He would have benefitted from How to Believe in Your Elf.

"I can only say, that book, readers, and author, ought all of them to continue in the dark."  From the red preface of Archery and Archness by Robin Hood, 1834.  [We previously saw why this preface is all in red.]

Since so few prefaces are actually read, this preface is at least red.  From Archery and Archness by Robin Hood, 1834.