This one is depressing, for reasons that are entirely personal. This small folder of stuff has been hanging around forever, taunting me: you can’t make a site out of this, can you? Old book covers and stuff? Nope. Or did you? Is it back there somewhere, with that one peculiar statue of Isaac Asimov? Wait - yes! There was Washington Confidential, too, and a 1984 cover. Where was that? When was that? Who cares?

For a while it was put into the Misc hopper, the folder of stuff that goes above the ad - one of those things I don’t have to do, but do, for some reason. Just to give you something to look at, I guess. But then it was moved to Hiatus Material, the standard for which I don’t understand at all.

You have no idea how fraught these pages are. Behind the scenes. How I anguish.

Anyway: old books.

Scully, eh? As in Dana's dad? Wikipedia:

In October and November 1949, Scully published two columns in Variety, claiming that dead extraterrestrial beings were recovered from a flying saucer crash, based on what he said was reported to him by a scientist involved.[5][6] His 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers expanded on the theme, adding that there had been two such incidents in Arizona and one in New Mexico, a 1948 incident that involved a saucer that was nearly 100 feet (30 m) in diameter. The saucers supposedly worked on magnetic principles. In the book, Scully revealed his two sources to be Silas M. Newton and a scientist he called "Dr. Gee." Sixty thousand copies of the book were sold. Scully was known for his idiosyncratic prose, describing Dr. Gee as having "more degrees than a thermometer" and an alleged crashed saucer in the Sahara as "more cracked than a psychiatrist in an auto wreck.

Of course that's where the X-Files Heroine's name came from.

The cover has the look of Renaissence religious works:

Another example of the Distant City. Apparently everyone got up in the middle of the night and fled to the outskirts in their pajamas.

This one was given to me by a friend who found the volume at an estate sale. That makes sense. This is just the kind of book you find these days at an Estate Sale. Maybe some Peanuts compilations that the kids had, and Mom couldn't bear to throw them away.

Laughs. From Bennett Cerf. LAUGHS.

Wit and wisecracks of "'Dear Abby' Herself," eh? Oh, my! Wet noodles for every guilty backside. Or maybe that was Ann. Anyway, as far as those Cartoons Round the World, they have the Sixties style that elevated people who had Ideas but absolutely could not draw.

Really, they just couldn't draw at all:

At least they were funny, right?

RIGHT?

Cerf had been doing this for a while. "In 1944, Cerf published the first of his collection of joke books Try and Stop Me, with illustrations drawn by Carl Rose. A second book Shake Well Before Using was published in 1949."

And on, and on, and on.

Why yes. Yes the vernacular has changed.

I'd be interested in finding out how the word went from one meaning to the other, but this is a case, I suspect, when Google is not your friend.

Okay, I'll do it.

Huh: the meaning survived into 2007, but even then, c'mon: they had to know. (To be honest, it's a reprint of the Seuss book, possibly the one above.)

Yes, yes, I know: the classic page of Batman's Boners.

From the back jacket of a book called "The Body Fell on Berlin," which I had sitting in my office for years simply because I liked the design on the front:

This is completely the natural way of which the speakers engage!

Shut up! I'm trying to read!

So this wasn't very much. Hey, remember the other day when I said could be worse, could be giving you a redesigned site about Hotel Stationery and expecting you to be all thrilled?

I wasn't kidding. It's been doubled in size as well.

Tomorrow: more exciting airchecks from a Columbus OH radio station in the 70s.