“Flora” is another edition of the popular German game “Quartett,” in which players collect four of a kind.  In this case, it’s flowers.  There’s no date or publisher listed on this, but it was a while ago. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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Ray Palmer is one of my favorite editors.  He took over the early science fiction pulp, Amazing Stories, in the ’30s; and turned it into an extremely unusual magazine in the ’40s, when he published the hallucinatory output of Richard Shaver.  (We’ve featured Shaver ourselves here many times, as a search will reveal.)  Readers balked […]

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Parker Brothers’ 1927 creation, “Lindy: The New Flying Game,” was touted as “A Sequel to the Famous Parker Game TOURING.”  “Touring” was about cars; the sequel was about airplanes.  It used a rather large deck (99 cards), and many crisp black and white drawings of ’20s aircraft. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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If the melon insists on having slices, it will end up eaten by families. Boredom and idleness are, I think, the principal motives for devotion.  We only lift our eyes to the heavens when we have nothing to do or hope for on earth, and we only kiss holy images when we have nothing else […]

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“Dichter-Quartett” is an undated German edition of “Authors.”  I’ve chosen Adelbert von Chamisso, for his contributions to botany, and for the creation of Peter Schlemihl.  The other authors in this canon are: Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Victor von Scheffel, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Rückert, Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Ernst von Wildenbruch, Emanuel Geibel, […]

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  An assortment of unusual instruments was featured in the July, 1952, issue of Music News.  Unfortunately, I have played only three of these. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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