Enough to Make a Frog Laugh!

Illustrator Palmer Cox was best known for his Brownie books, but this was one of his lesser-known collections of short poems accompanied by his illustrations. Queer People was a three-volume set of short children's books, consisting of "Wings and Stings," "Claws and Paws," and "Goblins, Giants, Merry Men and Monarchs". Unfortunately, "Wings and Stings" is the only one available, in its entirety, on Google Books. The verse is light and visually-driven, as you might expect from an illustrator, so if the other two books are anything like "Wings and Stings," I'd agree that any one of them could make a frog laugh. This ad appeared in Old Time Agriculture in the Ads, by a book distributed by none other than Cenex.

Ads from The NYT Book Review

The New York Times, happily releasing their decades of archive articles to the world, has some fun stuff -- such as this collection of advertisments that ran in their book review supplements. Hunter Thompson, of course, is a favorite, but there's enough of everyone's favorites to enjoy. I think the funnest part is looking at these books through the eyes of someone who didn't know these would be classics, or even that these authors would ever amount to anything.