The American Boys’ Book of Signs, Signals and Symbols, by Dan Beard (1918), is a richly illustrated (“362 illustrations by the author”) collection of symbols: hobo chalk signs, cipher alphabets, common gestures, lantern and whistle railway signals, semaphore, and more. Here, for example, is a page of “Toot-Talk,” the signals used by steamers. Many of […]

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Gelett Burgess’s story “The Man Who Lived Backward” (Blue Book Magazine, January 1946) uses anagrams in a way I haven’t seen before. The story is, as the title warns us, about a man who lived backward, aging into an infant. The man is named Levi Wicet, and we are informed that the men in the […]

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