• "I have plodded for more than twenty years in the Libraries of New York and London. There are millions of persons who would think this is a dreary existence. But the challenges - the excitements - the finds."

• "We shall pick up an existence by its frogs. Wise men have tried other ways. They have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin ... One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."

• "It could be that, in reading what most people think are foolish little yarns of falling stones, we are, visionary, in the presence of cosmic constructiveness - or that once upon a time this whole earth was built up by streams of rocks, teleported from other parts of an existence. The crash of falling islands - and then the cosmic humour of it all ... the force that once heaped the peaks of the Rocky Mountains now sling pebbles at a couple of farmers, near Trenton, NJ."

• "An unclothed man shocks a crowd - a moment later, if nobody is generous with an overcoat, somebody is collecting handkerchiefs to knot around him. A naked fact startles a meeting of a scientific society - and whatever it has for loins is soon diapered with conventional explanations."

• "If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there's any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen."

• "If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."

• "Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way to disturbing contact."

• "Why don't they see, when sometimes magnificently there is something to see? the answer is the same as the answer to another question. Why, sometimes, do they see when there is nothing to see?"

• "I do not know how to find out anything new without being offensive." 

• "Horses erect in a blizzard of frogs, and the patter of worms on umbrellas. The hum of ladybirds in England - the twang of a swarm of Americans at Templemore, Ireland. The appearance of Cagliostro - the appearance of Prof. Einsteins theories. A policeman dumps a wildman into a sack, and there is alarm upon all the contents of this earth because of a blaze in (the constellation of Orion) ... All are related, because all are phenomena of one organic existence."

• "I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of mind are subject-matter for beliefs." 

CHAPTER 1.

     A NAKED man in a city street - the track of a horse in volcanic mud - the mystery of the reindeer's ears - a huge, black form, like a whale, in the sky, and it drips red drops as if attacked by celestial swordfishes - an appalling cherub appears in the sea -

     Confusions.

     Showers of frogs and blizzards of snails - gushes of periwinkles down from the sky -

     The preposterous, the grotesque, the incredible - and why, if I am going to tell of hundreds of these, is the quite ordinary so regarded?

     An unclothed man shocks a crowd - a moment later, if nobody is generous with an overcoat, somebody is collecting handkerchiefs to knot around him.

     A naked fact startles a meeting of a scientific society - and whatever it has for loins is soon diapered with conventional explanations.

     Chaos and muck and filth - the indeterminable and the unrecordable and the unknowable - and all men are liars - and yet -

     Wigwams on an island - sparks in their columns of smoke.

     Centuries later - the uncertain columns are towers. What once were fluttering sparks are the motionless lights of windows. According to critics of Tammany Hall, there has been monstrous corruption upon this island: nevertheless, in the midst of it, this regularization has occurred. A woodland sprawl has sprung to stony attention.

     The Princess Cariboo tells, of herself, a story, in an unknown language, and persons who were themselves liars, have said that she lied, though nobody has ever known what she told. The story of Dorothy Arnold has been told thousands of times, but the story of Dorothy Arnold and the swan has not been told before. A city turns to a crater, and casts out eruptions, as lurid as fire, of living things - and where Cagliostro came from, and where he went, are so mysterious that only historians say they know - venomous snakes crawl on the sidewalks of London - and a star twinkles -

1.

Read the full text of Lo! at the website of Mr X - website

The Illustrated Lo! by Alexander King

Alexander King (1899-1965); born Alexander Koenig in Vienna, he and his family emigrated to the United States in 1913. As well as being an artist and accomplished illustrator he was also a bestselling humorist, memoirist and media personality of the early television era.

He illustrated numerous editions of classics in the early 20th century, including a series of illustrations for Charles Fort's book 'Lo!', published by Claude Kendall in 1931. He was also the author of several books, including 'May This House Be Safe from Tigers', 'Mine Enemy Grows Older', (an account of his addiction to morphine, and his recovery), and 'I Should Have Kissed Her More'. King's easy conversational recollections of the first part of the 20th century are informative and often hilariously funny.

In his late fifties, after becoming a frequent guest on the Tonight Show hosted by Jack Paar, King emerged as an incongruous presence in the realm of national celebrity: an aging, irascible raconteur, with elegant mannerisms and trademark bow-tie, who spoke frankly and disarmingly about his bohemian lifestyle, multiple marriages, and years-long struggle with drug addiction. He counted among his friends such notables as Tanaquil Le Clerq Balanchine, wife of George Balanchine, E. E. Cummings, Isak Dinesen, R. Buckminster Fuller, Moss Hart, Lena Horne, Walter Matthau, Marianne Moore, J. Perelman, Billy Rose, and Gloria Vanderbilt. His checkered past led TIME magazine to describe him as:

"an ex-illustrator, ex-cartoonist, ex-adman, ex-editor, ex-playwright, ex-dope addict. For a quarter-century he was an ex-painter, and by his own bizarre account qualifies as an ex-midwife. He is also an ex-husband to three wives and an ex-Viennese of sufficient age (60) to remember muttonchopped Emperor Franz Joseph. When doctors told him a few years ago that he might soon be an ex-patient (two strokes, serious kidney disease, peptic ulcer, high blood pressure), he sat down to tell gay stories of the life of all these earlier Kings."