Jonathan Caws-Elwitt suggests "Postmodern fiction gimmick #835: I envision a novel, set in an office, which is printed on loose sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 'memo' paper, with each chapter in a separate manila folder.  Footnotes could be on Post-Its.  The whole thing is (not) bound in a big green Pendaflex hanging file folder."

"People think that a sense of humour is to do with being able to recognise at a glance what is funny and what is not.  It is nothing of the kind.  It is a recognition that everything is funny if you look at it in one way rather than another.  And one of the ways of making things seem funny to other people is, for some reason, to do an almost, but not quite, exact imitation of them.  And this is a matter of noticing mannerisms, and reproducing them with a slight element of caricature.  Verbal mannerisms as well as behavioural ones.  People call these clichés, and go on about them as if it were some mark of near-illiteracy to make use of them.  So what is life supposed to be — an unremitting process of spontaneous creation?  Everybody resorts to clichés: how would would speech, or life itself, be possible? ... [I]t is part of one's sense of proportion to recognise that everything, however seriously it may deserve to be taken in one context, is inherently absurd in another.  It is particularly salutary to do so in those moments when the human race is on its high horse about being some superior form of creation — than which no spectacle could well be more laughable to anyone in a laughing mood." —N. F. Simpson's highly recommended Most of What Follows is a Complete Waste of Time: Monologues, Dialogues, Sketches and Other Writings

From Franz Josef I und Seine Zeit by Theodor Schiff, 1878.

Here's the secret to handling any book with glaring omissions:

"There is no way of emending a confused book, but everything may be supplied in the case of books with omissions.  For my own part, when I read one of the latter type I am not bothered a bit.  What I do, on arriving at the end, is to shut my eyes and evoke all the things which I did not find in it.  How many fine ideas come to me then!  What profound reflections!  The rivers, mountains, churches, which I did not find on the written page, all now appear to me with their waters, their trees, their altars; and the generals draw swords that never left their scabbards, and the clarion releases notes that slept in the metal, and everything marches with sudden soul.  The fact is, everything is to be found outside a book that has gaps, gentle reader." —Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro

Here's a peek into life before Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.  From Imprisoned in a Spanish Convent by Eustace Clare Grenville Murray, 1886.

Harvesting anxiety from tomorrow's forebodings, from Blasts from The Ram's Horn, 1902.

One of the Carrollian twin cities, surnamed Dee and Dum.  From Het Hartzgebergte en de Rijnstrom by Arend Ludolf Wichers, 1839.

Here's a precursor to the Pillsbury Doughboy, 57 years before his television debut.  From Ye Butcher, Ye Baker, Ye Candlestick-Maker by Robert Seaver, 1908.

From Journeys through Bookland by Charles Herbert Sylvester, 1922.

"The little grey man and the fairies," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

"Down—certainly, relentlessly down!"  From The Pit and the Pendulum, in The World of Romance, 1892.

"The is the secret of Hall-in-the-Wood," from The Mystery of Hall-in-the-Wood by Rosa Mulholland, 1893.

Ceylon (Sri Lanka) is a precursor to paisley.

Here's how to invert any yearbook photo without using a blade, from How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook, our controversial exploration of how college annuals are profoundly occult objects.

"There is something of which I am fearfully afraid.  It is called outer darkness."  From An Evil Spirit by Richard Pryce, 1892.

From Fate in Arcadia by Edwin John Ellis, 1892.

"Mark begins to be jolly under creditable circumstances," from The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1893.

For fans of the 60s cult TV show The Prisoner and the Welsh fantasy village of Portmeirion, our Tarot of Portmeirion deck is now carried by The Game Crafter.  (See Bonnie Cehovet's review of our deck over at Aeclectic Tarot.)

Here's a precursor to a lyric in "Esperantolando" by Ken Clinger and Herr Purpur (from the album KCollab.01): "Speaking with a carrot, the carrot answers 'no.'"  In this earlier variety, the carrot answers, "Certainly."  From The Land of Ram by H. Rose, 1890.  (By the way, we've collaborated with Ken on songs and even entire albums for nearly two decades, and it still stings just a little that the creators of the Ken Clinger tribute album, Till Next, didn't ask us to contribute.  No matter how exclusive any circle, that circle is actually a cone with echelons.  One cannot reach the uppermost echelons without shutting others out.  And so we take some comfort — if our exclusion made someone else feel that much more elite, then how could we begrudge?  Technically, our last 17 years have been an expansive, elaborate Ken Clinger tribute, and the thought of somehow "containing" our appreciation for him on a single disc is frankly too small-minded for us to comprehend.)

Here's the imp of the overturned goblet, doubling as an ornate capital S, from The Oxford Thackeray.  This should also be of interest: How to Believe in Your Elf.

"One of the ancestral ghosts at Duncaid Castle," from Leslie's Fate; and Hilda, or the Ghost of Erminstein by Andrew Charles Parker Haggard, 1892.

From Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, via St. Nicholas magazine, 1915.

From Le Physionomiste by Giambattista della Porta, 1808.

Guildenstern is famously not the very button on Fortune's cap, and we're pleased to reveal the very button in question, from an 1877 advertisement.

We don't know how to submit a guest post to Frog Applause, but here's our homage to Teresa's style.

The School of Hard Knocks: Five Tips on Designing a Reading Deck for Someone Else

Being asked to design a divination deck for a third party might sound fun, likely feels flattering, and possibly will prove to be profitable.  However, the hardest lesson of the process is an abstraction until it begins to feel all-too real: when you create cards for someone else, you're ultimately not in control, no matter how profoundly connected you find yourself to the cards in the process.  Perhaps as with any form of art, when you create a reading deck that's worth anything, your very soul goes into the work.  If the project ultimately gets caught up in limbo or permanently shelved, you're left in an excruciatingly uncomfortable position with little to no recourse.  I'll offer a crucial checklist for prospective card designers, but first a brief background on my latest experience working for a big name in the industry.

In early 2013, I was approached by world-renowned mind-reader Kenton Knepper to design a special deck of cards.  If you've heard of magicians like Doug Henning, Derren Brown, or David Blaine, you've seen Kenton's innovations in action.  He's a stage magician who doubles as an honest-to-goodness wizard (as well as maestro of the crystal bowls), and his goal isn't to trick people but to initiate and facilitate genuine, life-changing insights based upon his life-long study of the Mystery traditions.  Now Kenton didn't quite contact me from out of the blue — we'd been acquaintances for years, first coming onto each other's radar when Weiser Books published my Magic Words: A Dictionary, which is a complement to Kenton's Wonder Words study course.  One day I felt inspired to work up a little visual gift in his honor, to express my ongoing admiration of his expertise.  Here's what it looked like:

 
So I had put a little energy out there, and on the very same day Kenton returned that energy with an offer:  "Maybe you are the person to collaborate with me in creating a system of polarity and metaphor in images.  The idea is to help people come to their own conclusions, and making more 'wide awake dreams' with simple imagery.  Climbing a ladder with a ceiling underneath, falling up stairs with a leg tied to a balloon, that sort of thing.  Interested in this?"

I was most definitely interested, especially in the idea of a card system that would be "self-intuiting" and thereby allow a subject to decode his or her own insights, with the reader acting not as a professor who does all the talking but as a facilitator who listens to what the subject sees in the cards and asks questions as prompts when necessary.  I responded to Kenton: "Yes, indeed!  I might try to work up card imagery for the two examples you shared (climbing a ladder with a ceiling underneath, falling up stairs with a leg tied to a balloon), to see if my approach feels right for what you're envisioning with this project.  If we're in sync, let's definitely do this!  I love the concept -- it's very much my 'thing,' so ... yes!"

Kenton added that he was envisioning an "occult science feel" for the designs (as is typical of my work), with a rationality on display but also an aura of strange mystique.  Five days later, I submitted my drafts of his initial card ideas:

 

I had taken pains to make the imagery visually "work" either upright or reversed (so that the person drawing the card could instantly apprehend the symbolism at a glance).  For the ceiling ladder card, my initial thoughts were:

Upright: A figure climbs a ladder on the ceiling.  A folk proverb references Newton's 2nd law: "What goes up must come down."  Every step "higher" apparently goes lower, yet toward another way out.

Reversed: A figure climbs a ladder in topsy-turvy environment.  An old Mexican proverb: "You can't get up without falling down first."  Sometimes digging down is the most expeditious way up.

And for the card about falling up the stairs, I brainstormed: 

Upright: A figure takes a tumble yet is buoyed just the same and gains a higher vantage.  At the foundation is access to a cellar — a crypt? a vault? a cantina?  An ancient Buddhist proverb: "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

Reversed: A figure rises fast (too fast?) and is presented with the flip side: another way beyond the steps taken.  An ancient Taoist proverb: "Be like the water; seek the lowest place."  (An image reflected in the clouds is known as a Brocken spectre and is typically the magnified shadow of the observer.)

Kenton was pleased with the designs, though I was surprised to hear that he wasn't concerned about reversals.  He explained that from the perspective of his Mystery School training, "Reversal is simply a reflection, not necessarily an opposite at all.  I do however appreciate greatly how your drawings, when they have reversals in them, are powerful polarities that help people find their own inner wisdom and meanings at any given moment."  And he had his own card interpretations to add, of course.  For example, for the ladder card, he noted: "In secret ancient symbolism, going up is going in.  You cannot be raised higher without going into the depths of yourself."

And so, freed from taking extra pains regarding card reversals, I proceeded to follow up on eight additional card ideas from Kenton.  These were:

• A heart on water, broken but with the space filled with water, fire rising out of it, and bandages and stitches implying healing of the heart as well. 
• A person thinking so much that the head separates from the body.
• A picture of someone with her heart in her head and her mind in her heart area.
• A person electrified and shining a light out of himself, only to have it reflected back as a spotlight on him.
• A person growing like a flower out of the ground, but feet first coming up as the "bloom."
• A staircase a person is climbing that leads to the sky or clouds only, and perhaps the ocean reversed.
• A clock where the hands actually form an infinity symbol, and the hands are set to 8.
• A Merry-Go-Round inside someone's head, with the center pole going out the top of the head, connected to a Sun.

I don't have room here to display all of the designs I came up with, but here's the broken heart on the water (and the leaf motif in the heart was my own contribution to the concept):

At this point in the process, my Muse began suggesting ideas, so I began adding new cards alongside Kenton's suggestions, just in case they matched his intentions.  Luckily, we seemed to be in sync, and he welcomed my ideas as they were or suggested modifications.  After four months of nearly daily back-and-forths, we found ourselves with 52 cards, and I ordered a jumbo-sized proof deck from TheGameCrafter.com.  Kenton expressed enthusiasm that not only card readers and mind-reading magicians would find this deck useful but the general public as well, since the cards didn't require a facilitator.  I won't say that cartoon dollar signs began to ca-ching before my eyes, but I did have reasonable expectations that something might indeed come of this deck.

And then limbo set in.  For over two years, the deck saw no release whatsoever.  Kenton regularly showed off the cards at underground magical gatherings in Las Vegas, but he seemed content to keep the deck as his own best-kept secret.  The cards got talked about, and they acquired the street names of "Waking Dream Cards," "Metaphor Cards," "Subconscious Communication Cards," "Transformation Cards," and "K-Kards."  But their official name remained "[Self-Intuiting] Polarity Cards."  Then — horror of horrors — I heard inklings from mutual friends that Kenton was on the verge of retiring from mentalism, and cartoon alarm bells began ringing in the space between my ears.  If Kenton packed it in, the Polarity deck would be doomed to obscurity, and four months of solid work would evaporate into the ethers.

Attempting to play it cool, I drafted an e-mail to Kenton, marveling that it had been over two years since we had completed the deck, and being careful not to mention that every single day of those two years had felt like an eternity to me.  I asked if there was anything I might be able to do to move the project out of limbo, such as drafting a booklet of card interpretations, designing a box for the deck, and finalizing the various technical issues with fulfilling orders through TheGameCrafter.  Luckily, Kenton was now amenable to offering the deck to the general public, and it's belatedly available through TheGameCrafter.

So if you're approached to design a card deck for a third party, here's a checklist to consider:

1. Does the client know your work well enough that your style is sure to be a fit for the project?  The last thing you'd want to happen is to deliver a draft of the first card and find the client out of sync and looking for another designer.
   
   
2. Can the client offer a timeline so that you'll know exactly when to expect the deck to be released?  If there's no set date, that means the project is amorphously waiting for some time in the future, and that's nearly equivalent to "never."
   
   
3. Is the client open to an organic process, willing to hear your own suggestions along the way?  Designing cards is such a personal experience that you'll most certainly have your own brainstorms.  Also, any art project tends to develop a life of its own and may grow in its own directions.  Both the artist and the client need to be open to going with the flow, at least to a degree, even as the artist strives to maintain within the client's previously-set parameters.  Whenever an aspect of the project begins to veer off the original path, the artist is responsible for finessing the situation.  Spend time tactfully handling the change so that it does not present as a surprise.  It's probably never wrong in a divination deck to credit your intuition for slight alterations in the existing plan, as intuitiveness is woven into the very concept of card reading.
   
   
4. Is the client willing to offer payment in advance of the deck's release?  Even if you have negotiated a percentage of the sales, an advance on those royalties will be the only insurance that you'll see any money whatsoever.
   
   
5. Are you willing to take on this project no matter what might go wrong and no matter if the deck never sees the light of day?  This is the toughest question of all, but it's vital to consider it since you won't be in total control.  The answer may very well be Yes -- your spirit may jump at the chance to work on a particular deck, come what may.  And, truthfully, there's no such thing as wasted effort.  Even if a deck you've designed never gets released, the very process of creating each card was part of your own spiritual refinement.  A completed but unreleased deck becomes like a dream, and how much of daily life is illusory anyway?  If it's all a dream, let it be a lucid one that you learn and grow from.

 

Here's a precursor to N. F. Simpson's brilliant satire Was He Anyone, from A Princess of Chalco by Alfred Henry Wall, 1892.

They say you can't take it with you, and here's why, from The Dance of Death, 1820.

From The Sanitary News, 1886.

From Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, 1902.

[Someone should write] "a novel which consists only of irregularly torn pieces of paper, a narrative, a soliloquy, spoken by the lone, unlonely protagonist whose mind is actually a collection of irregularly torn pieces of paper, a narrative, a soliloquy, etc..." —William Keckler

Did you know that musical scores can have drop caps, too?  These are from Robin Hood: A Collection of Poems, Songs, and Ballads by Joseph Ritson, 1884.

From Harry Lorrequer by Charles James Lever and illustrated by Phiz, 1892.

From Blasts from The Ram's Horn, 1902.

The devil whispers a great secret to a cow, from Blasts From the Ram's Horn, 1902.

"A winter nosegay," from The Choice Works of Thomas Hood, 1881.

From A Book of Ballads by Alice Sargant and illustrated by Ailliam Strang, 1898.

From The Davenport Brothers, 1869.  This should be of interest: Seance Parlor Feng Shui.

"'Absurd, indubitably absurd,' he said.  'Absurd' was the word for today.  'Indubitably' was yesterday's word.  Mr. Phelps said that if you used a new word three times, it was yours." —Ernest Hebert, The Dogs of March  [If you wish to know what Friday's word was, highlight to view: peruse.]

If you must tumble down the stairs, for goodness' sake do it lovingly.  The caption reads, "We rolled down most lovingly together."  From Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

At the end of a story, the characters are collected into a locked trunk.  From The Oxford Thackeray.

"Machines of most types change or disappear; even institutions die; the clock is unchangeable and eternal.  The last man, when he says farewell to the cold, exhausted sun, will consult his watch in order to know the exact time of his death." —Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

"Up flew his holy body," from The World of Romance, 1892.

From The Voiage and Travaile of Sir J. Maundevile, 1839.

You do the math: "Two stockings and two shoes added together make a great many when one has the dawdles."  From St. Nicholas magazine, 1910.

"Portraits of lemons," from The Oxford Thackeray.

Yes, this was written by a batty individual: The Insanity of Over-Exertion of the Brain by J. Batty Tuke, 1894.

"The ghost of old Sir Giles," from The World of Romance, 1892.

"She taught me the secret," from Leslie's Fate; and Hilda, or the Ghost of Erminstein by Andrew Charles Parker Haggard, 1892.

"She took down her Shakespeare," from White Poppies by May Kendall and illustrated by R. A. Bell, 1893.

Here's a precursor to "photobombing," in which a stray figure on the left pulls focus from what is Through the Eye of a Needle (by L. Trelyven Creole, 1892).

The quest to decode the individual letters in a name goes way, way back.  Our research triggered a realization that every name encodes an ancient Egypitan poem.  As the original publication of our findings is freshly out of print, and as it was originally intended exclusively for professional magicians and mentalists, we were inspired to offer a revised and expanded edition containing twice the number of example readings, so that anyone can perform the technique for friends.  No memory or guesswork is required.  You’ll understand the hidden Egyptian meaning of your name instantly, and you’ll be able to dramatically interpret friends’ names.  You don’t have to be a poet or expert on symbolism to shine with our technique.  You’ll simply say aloud what you secretly know the letters to mean.  Here are the details.

Here is revealed one of our secrets of time bending — bribing Father Time with New-Year Caraway Cakes, the recipe of which appears in St. Nicholas magazine, 1910, p. 285.

Q: What is the purpose of this spoiler/disclaimer?  When I was a kid, our jack-in-the-boxes didn't warn us.  No way, no how.  If you were going to have a heart attack, you were just going to have a heart attack when the evil troll that lives in that box came for you at an astonishing rate of speed.  Plain and simple.  But now there are warnings on the damn thing.  The funniest part is I don't think too many two-year-olds read.  So the point is...? —William Keckler

A: It's conceptual art. —William Keckler

From before it was cool to chill out: "We were all alarmed, but we were not chilled."  From Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

"She stopped and looked as far as the gloaming would let her," from Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses, 1892.

Does this necklace complement her ephemerality?  From The Dance of Death, 1820.

From our outpost at Tumblr:

This is a nifty 8-page satirical story by Jonny Chance about a fictionalized doppelgänger of comedian Paul Lynde who is not an alcoholic but rather "save[s] alcohol for occasions catered by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."  At first I thought the book was presented as a Burroughs-style cut-up, but the top of each page features commentary by the author about what inspired the story, trying to handle the delicate balance of mocking Christianity when religion isn't technically the subject, and the goal of shattering illusions in a truly challenging way without merely congratulating the already-converted (à la The Matrix and Fight Club).  At the bottom of each page is the Paul Lynde story itself.  The Clarion Journal will take you to a page with a link to the pdf, which is here: http://www.clarion-journal.com/files/paullynde.pdf.

Here's how any blank piece of paper is actually a magic trick with a false bottom:

Gentlemen, observe this piece of paper.  An ordinary sheet of paper, no watermark, no false bottom.  And now I'd like to ask someone for an ordinary pencil.  Thank you, sir.  In the meantime you can talk, play little games, do what you like, it won't make any difference to me.  And he sits down and begins to write.  Anyone can write.  There is no shortage of words.  And off he goes with them.  Now he shows whether there's anything in him or not, now he gives it all he's got.  And when we read his story, we forget this dreary reality, we discover in our own room a secret door that we had never noticed before, behind which all sorts of strange and unheard-of things go on.  It's not such an ordinary bit of paper after all; there is a false bottom, and there is a watermark which no one can forge. —Ernst Kreuder, The Attic Pretenders

You've heard of "cooking the books."  Here are "manuscript recipes" from One Hundred and One Desserts by Mary E. Southworth, 1907.

"Plucking the long grass, I tried to cover myself with it."  From Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses, 1892.

From Blasts from The Ram's Horn, 1902.

"Mr. Nadgett breathes, as usual, an atmosphere of mystery," from The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens, 1893.

From The Transformations (or Metamorphoses) of Insects, 1870.

"Keeping [one's] seventy" is the new "keeping one's forty."  From The Old Looking-Glass by Maria Louisa Charlesworth, 1878.

"Now Isoline, remember, you are the 'Queen of the Night,'" from Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses, 1892.

"Chanted a long incantation," from The Secret of the Magian by André Laurie, 1892.

"Before, I had only heard of the mystery, NOW I feel it!"  From Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses, 1892.

Princess Ice-heart: "she shall be known for what she is," from Studies and Stories by Mrs. Molesworth, 1893.

From Blasts from The Ram's Horn, 1902.

"The clergyman making the experiment whether animals will drink intoxicating liquors," from Cobb's New Sequel to the Juvenile Readers by Lyman Cobb, 1852.

In honor of the phenomenon that is Floating Head Friday, here's a page from our latest project, How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook, which explores exactly why college annuals are chock full of severed heads, skulls, cauldrons, black cats, and devilish figures.

"The only certainty that is there is you. Why?—because even to doubt yourself, you have to be there." —Osho, Mindfulness in the Modern World

"A professor of the humanities," depicted in Here and There in Our Own Country, 1885.

"A most convivial meeting," from Handley Cross by Robert Smith Surtees, 1892.

Father Time is on the bottle again, from Le Guincaillier, 1907.

Here's a precursor to the "hundredth monkey effect" (not to be confused with the infinite monkey theorem), from St. Nicholas magazine, 1904.