“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)

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 at the “Shaver Mystery”; so Palmer left to pursue other projects, including Fate, Mystic, Search, Flying Saucers, and other magazines devoted to the paranormal and anomalistic.

Amazing Stories had a sister magazine, Fantastic Adventures.  It was devoted to “fantasy,” which Palmer defined rather broadly.  The issue depicted above, for example (August 1943), carried stories on: a Greek woman who invokes Apollo and Pegasus to fight the Nazis; a man whose life is taken over by three doppelgangers from the past; a man who inherits his uncle’s pet dinosaur; and a man who travels into the future with a yellow skeleton dispensing “temporary death.”

The prolific Robert Bloch also contributed two stories to the lineup: one about a group of gangsters who discover the Fountain of Youth, and one about a real estate agent battling fairies.  Rather than credit one of them to a house name, like Alexander Blade or Frank Patton, Bloch and Palmer opted for something less generic.  So it was that the fairy story was ascribed to Tarleton Fiske.  And Palmer, never one to do things halfway, even printed a photo and bio of Mr. Fiske.  Here, then, is Palmer in his prime, with a page devoted to an imaginary writer.

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)

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 to kiss.

Military officers are free to break their swords.

I pardon my children, as a condemned man pardons his executioners.

There are, as one knows, two ways to practice cannibalism: to eat human beings or to be eaten by them.

The ant economizes to assume alimentary security.  Such security consists of continual privation.

The idea of God dates exactly from the day when the quadruped — or quadrumane — felt the muscles of his buttocks hard and strong enough to permit a vertical position.  That day he looked up at the sky and feared it would fall on his head.  And, since he was not using his hands to walk, he clasped them together.

The sun is a cold globe, solid and homogenous.  Its surface is divided into square meters, which are the bases of long attenuated inverted pyramids, 696,699 meters long, their points one kilometer from the surface.

Liberty, equality, fraternity.  In other words: liberty for the strongest, to impose his fraternal, equal, and free principles on his subordinates.

The flag: something that hangs.

Drowned men seldom travel in schools, as fish do.  We can infer that their social science is still embryonic, unless we judge it simpler to suppose that it is their combativeness and military valor that are inferior to those of fish.  That is why the latter eat the former.

(Translated and posted by Doug Skinner)

“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, Theodor Körner, Christoph Martin Wieland, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gustav Freytag, and Ferdinand Freiligrath.  It’s an interesting group, many unknown to me.  Shakespeare is the only English writer, and, for some reason, the only to rate single name billing.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

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)

I just heard a politician on the radio, saying that the election is not about fundraising, but about the heart and soul of the party.

Those aren’t really dioramas
They’re just holes in your pajamas

ouija scrabble: messages from spirits are awarded points by letter

The American diet: Yesterday I saw a man walking down the street with a slice of pizza in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other.

make instruments from instrument cases

Never underestimate
Man’s capacity for hate

I’m always happy to meet someone who hates math. By the way, can you give me two twenties for a ten?

When life gives you lemons, you save a dollar.

logo + logo = Logos

sh(a)red

We cannot trust our brain or senses:
Nature, much like Señor Wences,
Says all’s difficult for us —
Especially if we make a fuss
About our nervous system, which
Will, all too often, bait and switch.

(Posted by Doug Skinner.  The illustration is by Benito Jacovitti.)

The following pictures are taken from the Fretted Instrument News, 1945-1949.  It was the “Official Organ of the American Guild of Banjoists, Mandolinists, and Guitarists,” “An Independent Bi-Monthly Devoted to the Advancement and Culture of the Romantic Instruments.”  It was particularly devoted to promoting “Fret Clubs,” amateur or school groups that played light classical selections on the romantic devices.  Accordions were often included in these ensembles, since “the accordion has now been accepted as an honored member of the romantic instruments’ family,” particularly since “it builds up crescendi, creates contrasts and new shades.”  All of this came before the folk music craze; the guitar was usually presented as a part of Spanish or Hawaiian culture.

Here are some of the ensembles.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

This old edition of “Authors,” from the Fireside Game Co., was devoted to “Young Folks’ Authors.”  It was an interesting selection.  Joining Mary Mapes Dodge in the juvenile pantheon are Louisa May Alcott, Charles Carleton Coffin, Eugene Field, George Bird Grinnell, Joel Chandler Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Otis Kaler, Charles Kingsley, Howard Pyle, Ernest Thompson Seton, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Francis Richard Stockton.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

David Gold and I will join Marc Jacobson and Larry “Ratso” Sloman for their “Live Radio Hour” on Wednesday, May 2, at 7pm.  It’s at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, NYC, and it’s all about the history of Coney Island; David and I will contribute a song from the Island’s past. Further information and directions can be found here.

I didn’t mention it here, but I was interviewed about John Keel for a Disinfo Podcast.  Matt Staggs asked the questions; it can be found here.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)