Almost anyone growing up in an English-speaking culture knows the story of The Tortoise and the Hare. In the tale, the two animals challenge one another to a race to prove who is fastest: mid-race, the hare lays down to rest, certain that it's going to win. Then out comes the tortoise, plodding along without pause, the winner; slow and steady wins the race, as the moral goes. Then there's a huge forest fire, and almost everybody dies.

Wait, what?

Turns out, some versions of The Tortoise and the Hare have a little more to say. As one of Aesop’s Fables, a collection of stories passed down by word of mouth since ancient Greece, the story has gone through many iterations, though most vary only slightly. Sometimes the tortoise is starting the trouble instead of the boasting hare; usually, a fox is the judge of the contest, as it was with the first written versions on record. And sometimes, things get a little morbid.

In the Irish writer Lord Dunsany’s 1915 version of The Tortoise and the Hare, the decision to award and support the tortoise is based on an unfounded capitalist ethos. The woodland animals support the tortoise during the race, believing he will win because of his hard shell. “Hard shell and hard living. That’s what the country wants. Run hard,” say the animals, who creepily chant “Run hard” in unison as he passes the sleeping rabbit, who had stopped running, having decided that racing against no one was a ridiculous task. The tortoise wins, and is celebrated by all as the fastest animal in the forest. Dunsany lets us know why we don’t usually hear this “real” version of the story, though:

“...very few of those that witnessed it survived the great forest-fire that happened shortly after. It came up over the field by night with a great wind. The Hare and the Tortoise and a very few of the beasts saw it far off from a high bare hill that was at the edge of the trees, and they hurriedly called a meeting to decide what messenger they should send to warn the beasts in the forest.

They sent the Tortoise.”

Obviously, according to Dunsany, slow and steady only wins the race sometimes.

Another subversive version from 1891, by the poet George Murray, called The Hare and the Tortoise, flips the moral in another way. In Murray’s story, a hare named Puss sleeps during the race, seeing that she is likely to win—but this time, the hare wakes up just in time to catch her mistake, leaping from her slumber. “Scared by the sight, with all her speed and strength, she galloped in a winner by length!” Murray writes. No need to be slow and steady if you wake up paranoid and ready to make up for lost time.

The anonymous nature of Aesop’s fables make them perfect for rearranging or reinforcing morals, and since no one really owns the stories or whether Aesop ever actually existed, anyone can make their own version. Hundreds of years after Aesop’s supposed death in the 5th century BC, the stories were written down in Greek, translated into Latin, and were finally translated into English in 1494, after which they became the most widespread collection of European folk lore out there—but not all of the oral stories in the current Aesop’s collection existed in the first Greek translation; new ones were added over time. The Tortoise and the Hare seems to be one of these stories, and may have snuck into the lexicon later.

In the 1668 French version of the story from Fables by Jean de La Fontaine, Le Liervre et la Tortue, the tortoise gets a bit persnickety at the end, asking how fast the hare thinks he could go if he were carrying his house around on his back. A Latin version of the story, called De Lepore et Testudine, was illustrated and printed in 1687 for an English audience with the moral and story printed as a rhyme, which reads: “Mean parts by Industry have luckier hitts, Than all the fancy’d power of lazyer witts,” indicating brains and perseverance prevail over the station one is born into. This was right around the time England came up with its Bill of Rights.

A book of English emblems and their meanings, The English Emblem Tradition, even describes the Tortoise and the Hare story as a guide to love; one emblem shows the Greek god of attraction, Eros, who is “walking along the roadway in a landscape, with the tortoise” when he “looks back over his shoulder, pointing at the resting hare.”

Early on, the Tortoise and the Hare story also made a foray into philosophy; in 490 BC Greek philosopher Zeno created the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, which describes a problem of motion. After the tortoise is given a head start against the legendary warrior Achilles; Zeno argues that based on math, Achilles should never be able to catch up if the tortoise keeps moving. Lewis Carroll, who was also a mathematician, had his own take on the Tortoise and Achilles paradox, which he brought to life in an 1895 issue of Mind:

“Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back.

“So you've got to the end of our race-course?” said the Tortoise. “Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or another had proved that the thing couldn't be done?”

“It can be done,” said Achilles.”

This time, Achilles and the Tortoise end up sussing out the details of the paradox, with Achilles scribbling the logical steps toward their conclusion in a nearly-full notebook while riding happily on the tortoise’s back. Carroll lends fellow mathematicians a piece of advice; rules for a certain logic have to be carefully thought out without relying on assumed truths to carry the weight of the argument.

The Tortoise and the Hare has had many adaptations over the years, becoming such a part of western culture that it pops up in advertisements for cars and creepy love hotels, and even as an alternative name for an algorithm.

As for how a real tortoise and hare would fare in a race, that story has also played out—recently. In 2016, a turtle and rabbit (a close approximation to a tortoise and hare) were put to the test in real life to see who would win, competing in an original arena, and subsequent rematches. Each time, the tortoise won.

In 1837, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the brothers most well known for their eponymous collection of fairy tales, were kicked out of their home. They had been working as professors at the famous University of Göttingen, Germany, when the King of Hanover, who ruled the area, demanded they and other academics swear an oath of loyalty.

The Grimms, along with five other professors, refused. The “Göttingen Seven” were stripped of their posts, and three of them, including Jacob Grimm, were banished from the state. He and his brother retreated to their hometown, Kassel. All of a sudden, the Brothers Grimm needed a new source of income.

They decided to take up an offer they had previously refused, from a publisher based in Frankfurt. They were to create a dictionary of the German language, a project so massive that by the time Jacob and Wilhelm died (in 1863 and 1859, respectively), they had only completed up through E. When the Deutsches Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary) was finally finished, more than a century later, it became the largest German dictionary ever compiled.

Though the project promised to be massive, the Grimms originally expected the job could be accomplished with four volumes. Even as that number began to expand, Jacob estimated it would take about 10 years to complete what had become a total of seven volumes. They planned to use German literature, from Luther to Goethe, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, to identify the words that should be included.

Quickly, though, the project sprawled in both time and space. The Grimms hired readers to comb through key texts, document word use, cite relevant quotations, and submit words cards for inclusion in dictionary. That work was supposed to take a couple of years, until 1839. Instead the brothers were receiving word submissions through the 1840s, as Kelly Kistner, who studied the dictionary as part of her doctoral work at the University of Washington, writes. The process of alphabetizing the submitted words didn’t begin until 1847.

In the early 1850s, more than a decade after they started the project, the Grimms began to release the first results. The first full volume of the dictionary wasn’t published until 1854, though, and it only included A to Biermolke. (“Biermolke” translates to “beer whey,” or, as the Grimms put it, “whey of such milk as can be coagulated into beer.”) The second volume, Biermolke to E, appeared six years later, in 1860, the year after Wilhelm died. (He had only completed the Ds.) Jacob died three years later, in 1863, still in the middle of the Fs. The last word he worked on was “Frucht,” "fruit."

The entries that the Grimms created did not necessarily conform to the standards we have for dictionaries today. At the time, the idea of systematizing a language in a comprehensive reference book, with etymologies, historical uses, and references for each word, was an innovation. The Oxford English Dictionary would not be published for another two decades, with its first edition in 1884. So the Grimms made up the rules for the project as they went along. They considered their dictionary a sort of natural history of words, and their entries weren't beholden to offering clear definitions. Jacob, in particular, presented personal musings on the development and history of intriguing words. The result was sometimes poignant and beautiful—but not exactly standardized.

Still, after the brothers’ deaths, their colleagues believed the project was so important that it needed to be finished. In 1867, the project started to get government funding, and for years the Grimms’ successors toiled, ever so slowly. Rudolf Hildebrand, who started as a proofreader and later became an editor, estimated in 1865 that the dictionary would stretch to 14 or 15 volumes. In his own work on the dictionary, which was supposed to start with K, he only managed to finish K and part of G.

In the early 20th century, the Prussian Academy of Sciences took over management of the project and work on it continued through World War I. During World War II, the staff of the dictionary dwindled to just three, and like other valuable cultural objects the records of the work were stored in salt mines, where they were discovered by Russian troops and eventually brought to Berlin. After the war, work on the dictionary was recast as an East-West collaboration, with work split between Göttingen and Berlin.

In 1951, about a century after the first slim section of the dictionary was published, Ralph A. Brenninger, writing in The German Quarterly, reported that the finished product was likely to be 32 volumes in all. He turned out to be correct. When finally completed in 1961, the dictionary contained 330,000 headwords in 32 volumes. By the time it was published, though, there was already a plan to rework the original A to F volumes, which, written in the Grimms’ meandering style, didn’t stand up to modern scholarship.

There was also an ideological critique of the Grimms' dictionary work. Even when the first volumes were released, some reviewers thought the words included had a bias—too much Luther, Kistner reports. But by the 1960s, the Grimms’ efforts had come under suspicion as a nationalist project that had fed into Nazism. In part, this critique was inspired by the brothers’ own fervent patriotism—Jacob often wrote of the need of a standardized language to unite the fatherland—and the Nazis' later adoption of the Grimms’ work for their own purposes. (They required schools to teach the fairy tales.) By the 1960s, the brothers' work on the dictionary work was dismissed as a dangerous ideological project.

Kistner argues, though, that these critics misunderstand the Grimms. The dictionary should be understood as a project riddled with Romanticism, which saw an organic unity to language, part of “a self-organizing world in constant motion, of autonomous but interdependent agents,” rather than a body of data that could be pinned down definitely. “It is likely that [Jacob] Grimm honestly believed that his dictionary selections, while not perfect, were not truly arbitrary,” Kistner writes, “rather, that they followed from his perceived organic unity of the language.” In other words, the dictionary was meant to explore the living landscape of the language, rather than preserve dried specimens of words.

The effort to rewrite A to F went on for decades—the revisions were only finished in 2016. Close to two centuries after it was first conceived, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, started as an effort to pay the rent, is a monument to the German language—and the legacy of the Brothers Grimm.

According to conventional wisdom, Latin is a dead language. But a simple Amazon search shows that it still has a surprisingly active life—not just in medical and law terminology, but also in children’s books.

After serving as the chief language of ancient Rome, and then as the language of scholars and holy men, Latin mostly faded out of modern usage. Even its study is becoming increasingly rare, but there are still some publishers and scholars who are taking modern works, mainly kids’ books, and translating them from modern English into what can best be described as a kind of modern Latin.

From picture books such as Walter the Farting Dog, to longer works such as Winnie the Pooh, and the first two books in the "Harry Potter" series, a wide variety of titles have made the jump to Latin over the years. Children’s books make good candidates for such translation work due to their simplified language and short length, and in turn can give the study of Latin a more contemporary feel. But this doesn’t mean that turning these books into Latin in the first place is any small feat.

“Green Eggs and Ham was very difficult,” says Terence Tunberg, who has been teaching Latin for over 30 years. Along with his wife, Jennifer, he has translated a number of children’s books into Latin.

In addition to Green Eggs and Ham (Latin title: Virent Ova! Viret Perna!!), the Tunbergs have also translated Dr. Seuss classics How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Quomodo Invidiosulus nomine Grinchus Christi natalem Abrogaverit) and The Cat in the Hat (Cattus Petasatus), as well as Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree (Arbor Alma).

“[They’re] a good teaching tool, there’s no doubt about that. We did not try to write simple Latin," says Tunberg. "We tried to translate it the best we could given the resources of the Latin language without dumbing it down.”

Tunberg, who specializes in neo-Latin, or the use of Latin after the Romans were dead and gone, never planned on translating kids’ books, but was contacted by prominent Classics textbook publisher Bolchazy-Carducci, who had purchased the rights to some of Dr. Seuss’s works. Given his background with the language, and his interest in how Latin evolved after Rome, the prospect of translating these modern works was right up his alley. Of course, the real reasons for the project didn’t escape him.

“As a textbook publisher, they’re out to make money. They caught on to the idea that if they have very young children's stories in Latin along with the regular books by Caesar and Cicero and all these other people, it would be a draw. And they were right. I still get royalties,” says Tunberg.

But the books, especially those of Seuss, presented a number of unique translation problems. As Tunberg explains, the real trick to a good translation isn’t always in the word-for-word conversion, but in maintaining the meaning and the voice of the original work. Given Seuss’s penchant for nonsense words and rare poetic meters (anapestic tetrameter, anyone?), converting his writing into a dead language, with its smaller vocabulary for describing certain modern concepts, wasn’t easy. Certain changes had to be made.

For The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, Tunberg relied on a poetic form from the Middle Ages that could work in Latin, yet sounded more modern than traditional Latin poetry. “The challenge there was obviously the Seussian wording, but also he had his own kind of rhythmical rhyme. We wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas in a very alliterative prose,” says Tunberg. While the Latin might not have been able to recreate the book’s rhyme scheme, by relying on alliteration, Tunberg was able to maintain the playfully poetic feel of Seuss’s original.

Another issue, of course, is Seuss’s made-up language. How should one describe a concept like Whoville in How the Grinch Stole Christmas? In order to effectively translate the invented words from the original, they had to look at what the author intended. “The Whos are happy, contented people. The Grinch is jealous, lonely, and wants to strike out at those he feels are having a good time when he’s not having a good time," explains Tunberg. "So the Whoville people were ‘the happy ones,’ ‘the contented ones.’ We produced a little coinage in Latin, ‘Laetopoli,’ which sounds good. It sounds kind of Seussian, and it means ‘Happyville.’”

By facing the unique challenges of these modern translations, Tunberg was effectively reviving the language and using it to make brand new (and somewhat silly) words. These days, the Latin children’s book genre continues to sell well among new and seasoned students of the language, brings in new readers and translators every year, and makes the ancient language seem more approachable.

In recent years Tunberg stopped translating modern children’s works, choosing to shift his attentions to his research. There are still books he’d like to see translated into Latin, though, such as Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Lord of the Rings (a Latin translation of The Hobbit, Hobbitus Ille, was published in 2012). To him, these swashbuckling stories are a great match for the vocabulary of the Latin language.

“If you want to keep Latin alive, and you want to keep people interested in it, the availability of that stuff is always good," says Tunberg. "Ultimately the classics gain too, because the student who reads my imagined version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is more likely to end up reading Virgil and Cicero.”

It might seem strange to be reverse-engineering modern works into a dead language like Latin, but it’s the only way we’re going to keep it alive.

This story originally ran on December 28, 2016.

“Perhaps no 20th-century children’s books blur the boundaries between art and propaganda in such compelling ways" as early Soviet children’s literature, says Andrea Immel, Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University. The Cotsen holds nearly 1,000 of these books, published between 1917 and the start of World War II. The collection demonstrates how then-new Soviet ideologies were communicated to the younger generation—even if the idea of indoctrinating children with colorful books wasn't itself new.

“While it's tempting to imagine that the Soviet experience was unprecedented because of overthrow of the tsar, it is possible to find other historical moments when reformers or radicals believed that the key to a better future was to provide children with books communicating superior values,” says Immel, citing John Newbery, known as the Father of Children’s Literature. “In the 1760s, he published out of the conviction that English society was corrupt and that one of the best ways to turn the tide was to bring up children differently.”

However, Immel notes, there was one crucial difference. “The Soviets were keenly aware of needing to leap ahead as quickly as possible, creating at the same time a new breed of men," she says. "And so the tremendous artistic firepower that could be harnessed in the Soviet Union of the 1920s brilliantly made the hard, unglamorous work of agriculture or electrification heroic and patriotic.”

The shift away from filling children's books with fairy tales was no accident. In their place, literature for children was focused on practical concerns and industry. The 1930 book Kak svekla sakharom stala (How the Beet Became Sugar) illustrates and describes the sugar production process: “Work is happening night and day. Night and day, sugar is being made from beets." In 80,000 loshadeĭ (80,000 Horses), the story of the Volkhov Hydroelectric Plant—the first in Russia and named after Lenin—is told in rhyme. Some of the books even created work themselves. The 1930 title Shimpanze i martyshka (Chimpanzee and Marmoset) provides instructions on how the reader can make a toy monkey.

The readership of these books wasn’t limited to the Soviet Union either. Immel corresponded with a writer from Kolkata who fondly remembers books from the Soviet children’s publisher Raduga. In the archive Immel discovered Millionnyĭ Lenin (The Millionth Lenin), by Lev Zilov, in which two boys from India participate in an uprising against the Raj. They flee the country and have a series of adventures that take them to the Soviet Union. There, they watch a parade before Lenin's tomb and don warm clothing (while retaining their turbans). "It had never occurred to me that Raduga books had been translated into South Asian languages or that South Asian people would be represented in Soviet children's books," Immel says.

There are also books about glorious achievements, such as pilot Georgiĭ Baĭdukov’s nonstop flight over the North Pole in the mid-1930s. But by this time, there had been a political shift that changed the way that children's books looked. Throughout the 1920s, the aesthetics of the books were diverse, and included the influence of the Russian avant-garde, including the work of well-known writers and artists. In 1934, the All-Union Soviet Congress of Writers declared that socialist realism was the only acceptable artistic style. Over the years, some writers and artists escaped into exile. Others did not.

In 1931, artist Vera Ermolaeva illustrated the book Podvig pionera Mochina (Mochin the Pioneer's Heroism). In the story, a Young Pioneer—the Soviet Union’s more militaristic answer to the Boy Scouts—helps the Red Army in Tajikistan. But by the end of the decade, both Ermolaeva and the book’s author, Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenskiĭ, fell victim to one of Stalin’s purges.

Memories of Soviet children’s literature linger today. Immel recounts a story of a Russian colleague who visited her and spotted some Raduga pamphlets. “He knew exactly what they were, being old friends from his childhood," she says. "He picked up the copy of Kornei Chukovsky’s Barmelai, illustrated by Mstislav Dobuzhinski, and began reciting it from memory.”

Atlas Obscura delved into the Cotsen’s Soviet literature holdings for a selection of children’s titles from the 1920s and 1930s.

Turns out, working as a nanny isn't half bad—just as long as you ignore the resident poltergeist.

A family in the Scottish Borders is seeking a live-in nanny to take care of their children (ages five and seven) while they are busy at work. The ad starts off innocently: they describe their "lovely, spacious" home, then list the duties a potential nanny would need to perform (making breakfast, dropping off and picking up the kids, assisting with homework, etc).

The vacation days? 28.

The salary? £50,000 (over $63,000).

The views? "Spectacular."

The only catch: 10 years ago, when the family was considering purchasing their current home, they were "told it was 'haunted,'" though they "kept [their] minds open and decided to buy the house regardless."

But the supernatural presence has since scared away several of the family's nannies, according to the ad:

5 nannies have left the role in the last year, each citing supernatural incidents as the reason, including strange noises, broken glass and furniture moving.

The family does emphasize that they cannot vouch for the validity of these occurrences:

We haven't personally experienced any supernatural happenings, as they have been reported only while we've been out of the house, but we're happy to pay above the asking rate, and feel it's important to be as up-front as possible to find the right person.

In the August 1961 issue of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, likely recognizing that his adult publication was missing out on a lucrative and untapped market, commissioned some material just for the kids. Six pages after a centerfold spread of Playmate Karen Thompson, Playboy Magazine printed its inaugural children’s work—Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book.

Shortly thereafter, Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book was published. Featuring much of the material from Playboy, it was the first book written by prolific author, musician, playwright and songwriter Shel Silverstein, then Playboy’s resident cartoonist. Over the past 55 years, it has become a literary cult classic, unknown by most, but fiercely adored by ardent fans.

Silverstein’s introductory work purports to be an educational tool, bearing the tagline, “A Primer For Tender Young Minds.” But upon the most cursory of inspections, it becomes clear that Uncle Shelby is not to be trusted with young minds, tender or otherwise.

Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book is a brazen work of satire. Borrowing from the tradition of children’s learn-the-alphabet books, Silverstein constructs a stable of mnemonic devices to help his readers take their first steps toward literacy. Unlike most alphabet books, however, Silverstein’s associations are not intended to reinforce memory, but to prey upon the insecurities of children, suggest mischievous misdeeds, and otherwise exploit the ignorance—er, innocence, of youth.

Following all of Uncle Shelby’s mal-advice would make for an exciting episode of Jackass. This is Silverstein at his most impish—he gleefully plays the role of devil-on-the-shoulder, encouraging young readers to throw eggs at the ceiling, ask mother to purchase a gigolo, and pretend to drink lye (if you pretend to drink lye, the doctor will pump your stomach and “give you a nice red lollipop.”).

Given all of the thinly veiled adult humor throughout the book, it seems quite clear that Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book is not intended for children. But some distracted adults, it seems, neglected to actually read it before passing it to their sweet, impressionable young ones —today’s parental equivalent of giving a child unprotected internet access. One scandalized reader on the book review site Goodreads didn’t realize her mistake until she had already begun a family reading. “The truly shocking page,” she wrote, “was where he was joking about going with kidnappers and eating the lollipops they offer.”

As a result of such misunderstandings, the current print edition, dating back to 1985, includes a stamp on the front that reads, “A Primer For Adults Only."

Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book is not the only work of Silverstein’s that was met with consternation from overzealous would-be book-banners. A Light in the Attic, his 1981 collection of children’s poetry, ranks 51 out of 100 on the American Library Association’s list of most challenged materials from 1990-1999 (it was also the first children’s book on the New York Times bestseller list). Some found the material offensive, citing poems that “glorified Satan, suicide, cannibalism, and also encouraged children to be disobedient.”

Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book never attained enough commercial success to make any “most hated by parents” lists. But at least it gave anyone a worthy reason to read Playboy—for the (children’s) articles.

Ellen G.K. Rubin never saw a pop-up book as she was growing up, so when she bought two for her young sons in the 1980s, she was amazed. "I was blown away, probably much more than they were," she says. Those two books—one about dinosaurs, another about vehicles—set off an obsession. Today she has a collection of some 9,000 books, as well as countless postcards and advertisements, that pop up or move in some way—hence her nickname, "The Popuplady."

Pop-up books are just one type of what are known as movable books, or books that in some way move to illustrate information or a story. Rubin has always employed a broad definition for her collection. "If you have to manipulate it in order to understand the illustration, or the story, or the text, or whatever it is that the writer is trying to convey,” she says, “then it is movable and fits into the criteria for my collection." All the books and ephemera that fit her criteria reside in a purpose-built library in her home just north of New York City. It is outfitted with special glass and wood shelves that eliminate sunlight and gases that can damage paper. Rubin handles the books with care, just as many of us were taught as children; she makes sure to not squeeze them shut, and storing some flat in drawers. Temperature control is particularly important. "If the glue dries, they pop off instead of up," she says. All these measures aren't really in place to protect the oldest books in Rubin's collection, which date back to 1547. "Keeping older books in good condition is not as difficult," Rubin says. Their pages were usually made with rags, which makes them more durable. Newer books are made of paper and are more likely to deteriorate with time.

Pop-up books are mostly closely associated with children today, but that's a relatively recent development. Before the 17th century, Rubin says, movable books were used for texts on medicine and astronomy. "Movable books, as far as we know, started in the 12th century," she says. The earliest example is a manuscript dating to 1121, titled Liber Floridus, that illustrates the orbits of the planets around the Earth. The top part of the page folds up, a gatefold, to reveal the complete illustration.

"The first movable that we say was for children," Rubin says, "was the turn-up book, or the harlequinade." Those were first printed around 1750. "You read it by looking at an image and then half of that image turns up. And what's underneath is integrated with the part that's not turned up. The text changes and the story changes with the change of the image."

The transition from harlequinades to pop-up books started in the late 1800s. In the beginning, these books were usually string-activated. "When you opened the book, a string pulled the pop-up up, or you pulled down a flap and then the whole thing popped up. So they did pop up, but they weren't self-erecting," Rubin explains. Self-erecting books—these are what we think of as pop-ups today—in which the act of turning the page is enough to raise a paper structure, first appeared in the 1920s. A copyright for the term "pop-up" for a book was filed in 1932 by Blue Ribbon Press.

More than 2,000 of the books in Rubin's collection were created by one person: Czech artist Vojtěch Kubašta. Kubašta was trained as an architect in Prague in the 1930s, and went on to illustrate and publish pop-up books in the 1950s and '60s. "The man was devilishly prolific. I am constantly finding new things,” Rubin says. “No one could ever have everything." More than 10 million copies of his books have been sold and his works have been translated into 40 different languages. Rubin says there are also subtle changes in the art between editions, making his work a bit of a nightmare for collectors. The changes can be as minor as six flowers on the cover of one edition of his Sleeping Beauty, compared with three flowers on another edition. "I'm not going through all my books, I don't even want to know that he made these changes. He is just infuriating," she says.

Kubašta is one of several notable artists in the long history of movable books, including the man widely considered the foremost genius of the form, Lothar Meggendorfer. Meggendorfer didn't make pop-ups, but his movable books were exceptional. "He used a single rivet and one pull tab, and there are many things that move on the page with that one movable [element]." His books, published in the late 19th century, weren't just for kids. "This was family entertainment, to sit around and read his books and move the tabs and have fun things or serious things move on the page."

An award named for Meggendorfer is given once every two years by the Movable Book Society. The award is for paper engineers, the craftspeople who create the movable pieces and work with illustrators and printers to bring pop-ups to life. According to Bruce Foster, a paper engineer based in Houston, Texas, there are only about 75 to 100 paper engineers worldwide, and most popular books are produced by the same 10 or 15 individuals. Foster himself is a prolific paper engineer, and creates a range of pop-up books for publishers, filmmakers, and advertisers.

Foster studied fine art in college and worked as a graphic designer before he became a paper engineer. His first experience with the form was an advertisement for juice. "I was 34 years old, and I'd seen one pop-up in my entire life. I had never even opened a pop-up book," Foster says. He soon found National Geographic pop-up books from the 1960s and '70s at bookstores and performed "book autopsies." "I would slice them apart," he says. "I'd figure out exactly how they made those [pop-ups] happen, and I started emulating."

Today, whether the project is a kids’ book, or the opening sequence of Disney's 2007 film Enchanted, Foster's process is the same. "The first phase of any project is strictly playtime," he says. "I play around a lot, work out these different mechanisms, putting them all together, experimenting." Once the pop-up is designed, Foster translates that to computer files that lay out the placement of cuts, folds, and illustrations. The files then go to a printer—usually in Asia, where labor costs are lower for the hand-assembly that each book requires.

“If paper engineers are puppet makers," says Rubin, "they hand the strings to the reader and the reader becomes the puppeteer." And for kids, playing puppeteer is second nature. "They so quickly learn, just like how quickly they learn to swipe on a screen. They learn to run their hand over the book looking for tabs or flaps. Once they see this can happen, they look for it."

Kati Dimoff, a professional photographer, has a routine: Every time she's in southeast Portland, she checks the big Goodwill there for film cameras with exposed, undeveloped film. She'll take the film to Blue Moon Camera, a shop with a love for older technology, and have it developed. "They are one of the best labs in the country for developing old, expired, or out-of-production film," she writes in an email.

In May, she found an Argus C2, which was manufactured in the late '30s and early '40s, with a roll of undeveloped film in it. It was Kodachrome slide film, and it was damaged. Blue Moon was able to develop it, though only in black-and-white, not the full Kodachrome color palette.

When Dimoff picked up the prints, there was a note on the package: "Is this from the Mt. St. Helens eruption?"

In a few of the shots, off in the distance, there was the mountain, with ash from the eruption spilling out of it.

That building in the foreground is the John Glumm Elemetary School, in St. Helens, Oregon.

The mountain last erupted in 1980, and Dimoff was hoping she might find the person who took these pictures. After The Oregonian published the photos on their website, along with a photo of a family that also appeared on the roll, she and the paper quickly heard from Mel Purvis, who recognized himself in the photo.

He believes the camera belonged to his grandmother Faye, who owned a clothing store in St. Helens and had also visited his family that year, to meet her great-grandson. "She was a very independent woman," Purvis told The Oregonian. She was born in 1899 and died in 1981, the year after these photos were taken. It's a mystery how they ended up at the Goodwill.

On a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station in January 2015, American researchers included some flatworms. The idea was to see how the normal regenerative powers of planarian worms—which can regenerate a head under the right conditions—would react to an environment with no gravity, and then what would happen when they came back to Earth.

After five weeks in space, the worms returned, and some of them were ... different. Some spontaneously divided themselves into identical worms. Others spent more time in light than Earth-bound ones do. And, most striking and kind of spooky of all, was one worm came back with a second head, a form of spontaneous regeneration that researchers had never seen before. (Both heads grew from a single amputated fragment.)

"Normal flatworms in water never do this," Michael Levin, the lead researcher on the project, told Live Science. Levin and his coauthor's research was published recently in the scientific journal Regeneration.

How could this occur? Levin doesn't know, exactly, but he theorizes that it could have been the "loss of the geomagnetic field, loss of gravity, and the stress of takeoff and landing.". Any number of things, in other words.

Whatever the case, the two heads are here to stay. Researchers tried amputating them anew, leaving a headless middle fragment, but both of the heads just grew back. A double-headed, spontaneously regenerating worm from space, huh? Everyone sleep well tonight.

While he is traditionally considered the protector of Gotham City, Batman is being called to L.A. this evening as the iconic bat-signal will be projected in tribute to the late Adam West.

According to CNN, DC Comics has announced the iconic bat-signal spotlight will be projected onto the tower at city hall to honor the actor best known for playing the Caped Crusader in the 1960’s Batman television series. The ceremony will be attended by both the mayor and the police chief in a show of appreciation that the fictional Batman has almost never received.

West’s portrayal of the Dark Knight in the hyper-campy series remains one of the most iconic versions of the character to ever have graced the screen. In stark contrast to latter day depictions of Batman, West’s version of the Detective Comics star was a colorful, optimistic figure that earned him the nickname, “Bright Knight.”

Attendees to the L.A. signal lighting are encouraged to don their best Batman costumes for the event. Jokers, Eggheads, Scarecrows, Two-Faces, and Catwomen are assumedly not welcome.

You're never too old for a good coloring book, a truth that was clearly familiar to people in the 18th century. The historical evidence? A 257-year-old coloring book intended for adults that was recently found in the collection of the Missouri Botanical Garden, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Botanists were way ahead of the #adultcoloring craze, based on a recent find in our library. More from @stltoday: https://t.co/U2Aj71T53Fpic.twitter.com/SHmCcuZLAO

— MO Botanical Garden (@mobotgarden) June 12, 2017

The book, titled The Florist, is one of just a handful of copies that survive, among them two held at the Yale Center for British Art. It was discovered by Amy Pool, a curatorial assistant at the garden. "She was doing some light reading in 'The History of Botanical Illustration' when she happened upon a reference to a 1760 coloring book," the Post-Dispatch reports. "Pool entered the title in the garden’s digital catalog and found it had a copy."

What's inside? Dozens of botanical images that were intended to show readers how to properly color the flowers according to nature. This copy, though, was never colored, a fact that may have helped preserve it after all these years. And now, the book, printed around 1760, might live forever: It's been digitized.

Decades ago, archaeologists uncovered a citadel in the desert of Israel, which was full of artifacts from the era of the First Temple in Jerusalem, the heyday of ancient Jewish rule in this part of the world. Among those finds were 91 ostraca, pieces of pottery with inked lines of writing on them. One of the most intriguing was Ostracon 16, the “Elyashive Ostracon, which was a personal letter from one soldier to another.

Now, researchers have discovered additional, hidden writing on the back of that piece of pottery—50 letters making up 17 words, according to Haaretz. This previously unknown text was found after a photographer thought he saw something on the back of the pottery; his photograph allowed a new analysis of the shard, revealing the text, as well as previously unknown lines of writing on the front of the pottery, too.

The newly found writing, as Haaretz reports, is “a continuation of a letter from Hananyahu to his friend,” Elyashiv Ben Oshiyahu. He’s asking that Elyashiv to send over some of the wine and food held in reserve at the fortress.

Many of the other ostraca contain dry orders to the quartermaster or commands for the army. What makes this one special is the personal touch—this was a letter between two friends, separated by the work, who wanted to keep in touch even as they were doing their duty.

A stands for Austria, where the first bomb was hurled/The Bomb that was destined to startle the world. So begins The Child’s ABC of the War, a book that teaches the letters of the alphabet not through animals or objects, but through a particular British view of the world and World War I. Printed in London in 1914, it was intended for three-year-old boys. The copy shown here, from the Florida State University's digital repository, was given as a Christmas gift, with a handwritten inscription: “with love and best wishes.”

What follows is the alphabet rendered in weapons, details of the war, and the Imperial British worldview. B is for Belgium, the "brave little state," and C is for Colonies, "loyal and true." For a book intended for small children, it doesn’t shy away from violence: T for Torpedo/It shoots under water/Dealer of death and disaster’s slaughter.

Unsurprisingly, there was some opposition to the book when it was published. In the 1915 issue of Kindergarten Primary Magazine, the “Chairman Peace Committee” Lucy Wheelock wrote, "Picture books such as The Child’s ABC of War … foster the spirit of antagonism and revenge and are not desirable influences in child life."

Britain produced other WWI-specific children’s books. Why Britain Went to War: To the Boys and Girls of the British Empire explains the conflict with a uniquely British analogy: “ ... we are standing up for honor among nations, while Germany is playing the sneak and the bully in the big European school. Germany must be taught to play cricket, to play fair … A boy who behaved as Germany has done would be sent to Coventry by all the school.”

Even nursery rhymes were co-opted for the war. Nina MacDonald's War Nursery Rhymes added bleak war specifics to well-known verses:

Little Miss Muffet,
Sat on a tuffet,
All on a summer's day,
When a bomb ('twas a dud)
Came down with a thud,
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

However, it wasn’t just Britain that filled children's books with wartime messages and propaganda. The 1915 German book Hurra! Ein Kriegs-Bilderbuch (Hurray! A War Picture-Book) tells the story, in verse, of two little boys killing the enemies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. And in France, André Hellé wrote Alphabet de la Grande Guerre (Alphabet of the Great War), “for the children of our soldiers,” which included C for Charge, T for Trench, and S for Submarine.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Britain's The Child’s ABC of the War.

Fidget spinners, as you probably already know, are small toys currently in high demand among millions of children and teens across the world (and come from a long lineage of ways to manage nervous energy). In most cases they consist of a simple bearing around which spins two or three lobes, allowing for "tricks" that don't seem quite so difficult. But who's to say?

All of this means there is a huge market for spinners, and a lot of them have been rushed into existence, which means, as German officials recently found, that corners have been cut and some spinners might be quite unsafe for play or fidget time.

According to the Associated Press, customs officials in Frankfurt seized a total of 35 tons of bad spinners over the month of May. They were tested and found to be dangerous because they could fall apart and create choking hazards for small children.

The spinners in question were produced in China, and many were missing both instructions and information about their provenance. Now, AP reports, German officials "plan on crushing [the spinners] out of existence." This feels both a little dramatic and potentially quite cathartic.

“About seven o'clock one hot summer evening a strange family moved into the little village of Middlesex. Nobody knew where they came from, or who they were. But the neighbors soon made up their minds what they thought of the strangers, for the father was very drunk.”

So begins the original version of The Box-Car Children, written by the 34-year-old schoolteacher Gertrude Chandler Warner in 1924. The book, about four siblings who run away from home after their parents die, would become a hugely popular series—with 146 books to date and an animated movie.

In the first book, the children hide from passing horse-drawn carts and trains, sleep in a haystack and soon come to the woods, where Jess, the older girl, spots a box car sitting on rusty, broken rails. Warner writes, “Her first thought was one of fear; her second, hope for shelter.” The children decide to make it their new home.

Picking up the original Box-Car Children today, the story is still an appealing one. But one element is lost on modern readers: The selection of a boxcar in which to play house seems somewhat random. For readers coming to the book in the 1920s, though, that choice might have seemed more natural. That’s because the image of another boxcar dweller, the rambling tramp or hobo, jolly and free of society’s oppressive norms, was everywhere. At the time Warner was writing the book, “hobohemia” was in a nostalgic moment. The comical, friendly hobo appeared in folk songs, vaudeville acts, novels, and was brought to life in films. Charlie Chaplin got his idea for one of his most famous characters—the Tramp—when he met a hobo in San Francisco.

The nostalgia for hobos that would have surrounded Warner and her young readers in the 1920s emerged because the stereotypical train-riding, scrappy migrant worker—who came out of the Civil War, when displaced soldiers began a transient life on the road—was disappearing. For one thing, the extent of the rail system reached a peak in 1916 and then declined as automobiles took over the landscape. The American economy shifted, making it harder for migrant workers to make a living. Historian Todd Depastino calls this “the closing of the wageworkers’ frontier.” He writes in Hobo Citizen that, “the age of speedup and mass communications had marginalized hobohemia, leaving it behind like a deserted right-of-way or a sidetracked boxcar.”

You can read hints of romanticized trampdom in The Box-Car Children. If readers of the children’s book series don’t remember any appearance of tramps in the books, that’s because Warner took it out of the 1942 version of the story, which she re-wrote using a smaller, simpler vocabulary in order to make the books more accessible to young readers. (There is also no drunk father in the 1942 version, if you were wondering.)

But in the 1924 version, two references are explicit. When the children are asleep in the boxcar and are frightened awake by the sound of someone moving outside, Jess says to Henry, “Supposing it was some other tramp, somebody else that wanted to sleep here!” A bit later on, seized with an affection for their beautiful home, the Alden children name their box car “Home for Tramps,” and print the title in fancy lettering inside the car.

Jolly tramp associations abounded in popular culture, but closer to home, Warner would have been thinking about trains a lot while growing up in Putnam, Connecticut. In the early 1900s, the town was a stop on the New England Railroad and the Boston and New York Railroad, both of which are now defunct. The Warner house was right across from the train station, so close that cinders from the passing trains landed on the house and the Warner children were tasked with dusting the windowsills twice a day to keep the house in good shape.

Speaking about the series later, Warner admitted that she had always thought it would be fun to live on her own in a little abandoned train car. “I would like to have done what they did,” she said. “I’d still like to do it.”

But the real people living in box cars—the tramps – had a pretty rough life. They performed hard labor, often for little pay, and built a good part of the train tracks, which then became their homes.

A hobo known as The Pennsylvania Kid left home in 1927 when he was 16 and didn’t look back. “Hoboin’ ain’t easy livin’,” he told the photographer John Lopinot in 1974. “What I been through—I don’t know how I lived.” Lopinot describes the experience of riding in a moving boxcar with Pennsy: “If you sit against the sidewall, the swaying motion of the train bangs your head against the oak boards lining the car.… It’s too rough of a ride to sleep.” The Interstate Commerce Commission estimates that between 1898 and 1908, 48,000 tramps died on freight trains—from complications jumping onto trains or because of the terrible conditions inside of them. Just as many were injured.

But despite the grim reality of life on the rails, Warner took a cheery view of life in a boxcar. The boring tasks of making house with the Alden children becomes a joy when Warner is telling the story. Her careful, enthusiastic chronicling of each domestic success (curtains for the windows! A darling little shelf!) are the small dramas that propel the book forward.

It is interesting today to return to Warner’s earlier boxcar children and re-read the romanticized details of hobo life that remain: the injured dog called Watch who follows the children around; the chipped plates and cups that they delight in using; the single pair of clothing Jess washes for each of them in the stream. That scrappy, glorified life led by the Alden children—one that kids still enjoy today—draws on a kind of nostalgia for the trains and the scrappy, hardened people who rode them.

In 2004, a group of Putnam residents and former students of Warner’s raised enough money to purchase an old boxcar. The Depression-era boxcar would have run on the line that passed by the author’s house when she was a child. It’s now a tiny museum, filled with artifacts from Warner’s quiet life—a desk, some papers and photographs.

Toward the end of her life, Gertrude Chandler Warner finally got to ride in the caboose of a train. According to her biographer, Mary Ellen Ellsworth, Warner’s friend—a retired engineer and road foreman—let her run the engine and blow the whistle of the train. “It was more of a thrill, I think,” Warner said about the experience, “going in after all those years of wishing.”

The Automatic Motorist, a British short film from 1911, wants you to avoid self-driving cars at all costs. In it, a robot chauffeur is developed to drive a newly wedded couple to their honeymoon destination. But this robot malfunctions, and all of a sudden the couple is marooned in outer space (and then sinking underwater, and then flying through the sky—it's complicated).

Directed by filmmaker and magician Walter R. Booth, The Automatic Motorist is a trick film—a genre of silent films popular in the early 1900s that emphasized special effects.

The full 6-minute short should be watched in its entirety, but we present you with a brief analysis below.

So at first, the experiment is going well. An engineer creates the robot chauffeur; the newlyweds love it. Maybe self-driving cars really are the future.

They're off—until a police officer stops the car and... well, the robot chauffeur gets a little carried away.

All of a sudden, they are fugitives of the law.

Naturally, the robot slams the accelerator—maybe a little too hard, however, because they end up motoring up the dome of what looks like St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

They are going so fast that they pay a visit to a very unhappy looking moon.

And then they are speeding across Saturn's rings.

And they... enter Saturn?

And the engineer from the beginning finds an alien lover. Okay.

But wait, they are still on the run from the police, so they have to make a hasty exit.

Naturally, the car plummets underwater.

But at least the happy couple appears to be enjoying their honeymoon!

But all of a sudden, they aren't underwater anymore. And a local man... shoots them out of the sky?

It's fine, though, because the robot is dead and the couple is reunited again. A happy ending for all.

Anyway, the point is—don’t ride in a self-driving car, at least until Tesla perfects it.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

In the early summer, the Black Sea belies its name. As currents swirl in from the Danube and the Dnieper, they bring in nutrients and cold water: a perfect environment for microscopic coccolithophores, tiny phytoplankton armored with reflective plates. When the sun reflects off these little beasts, the water they've colonized looks turquoise.

According to NASA, the painterly plankton are at it again—and this year's blob is particularly bright and swirly. The agency released a photo of it, taken by their Aqua satellite, earlier this week.

This star's-eye view is preferable to the one from the ground—a big, azure expanse that, the Guardian reports, has made some residents of Istanbul nervous about pollution. There's nothing to worry about, though: besides being harmless and colorful, the phytoplankton are providing tons of food for anchovies and other small fish. Not bad for such a tiny creature.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon, is the tale of Chitragriva, or “Gay-Neck,” the most beautiful pigeon in Calcutta. Gay-Neck is born in a fancier’s flock and attentively watched and cared for by an unnamed narrator, who occasionally cedes the story to the bird. “It is not hard for us to understand him," the narrator says, "if we use the grammar of fancy and the dictionary of the imagination.” Gay-Neck distinguishes himself from his flock with leadership, selflessness, and bravery before he is sent off to the front lines of World War I, where he serves as a homing pigeon, dodging German planes and struggling through clouds of mustard gas. The bird describes the clamor of war with a child’s innocence and a naturalist’s eye for detail:

Even there, in that very heart of pounding and shooting, where houses fell as birds’ nests in tempests, rats ran from hole to hole, mice stole cheese, and spiders spun webs to catch flies. They went on with the business of their life as if the slaughtering of men by their brothers were as negligible as the clouds that covered the sky.

In 1927, the Association for Library Service to Children gave Gay-Neck the Newbery Medal, its highest award for children’s literature. The book offers lessons of perseverance and sacrifice with the exotic detail of Rudyard Kipling, but without his colonial baggage. Gay-Neck was written by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, the first writer and scholar from the subcontinent to find success in America. In his time, Mukerji was a groundbreaking figure, a dashing, eloquent, astute observer of both the country of his birth and his adopted home. Over a relatively brief career, he gave countless talks about India and wrote poetry, drama, fiction, social commentary, and philosophy, in addition to the successful children’s books for which he is best known.

Despite his success, Mukerji was troubled by India’s political plight under the British, the elusiveness of spiritual communion, and a predisposition to loneliness and depression. The story of his spirited career and sad death has fallen into relative obscurity, though he primed America for later waves of South Asian immigrants and their descendants—including many a writer among them, from Jhumpa Lahiri to Bharati Mukherjee to Atul Gawande.

Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born near Calcutta to a high-caste family in 1890, one of eight children of an illiterate mother and an attorney father. His mother gave him fables, while his father introduced him to Don Quixote, taught him the six great Indian melodies, and told him of the Sepoy Rebellion. A sister with whom he was close died at age 12, but he has little to say about her passing in his unusual early-life memoir, Caste and Outcast. “In India we live with death on more intimate and friendly terms than in the West,” he wrote, “and it makes less impression on us.”

At 10 he went to study at a Scotch Presbyterian school. At 14 he trained to be a priest by renouncing his possessions and living as a wandering beggar for two years. “You cannot have poets if you do not have beggars,” he wrote. This, as one might expect, was a formative experience, though after that he lasted less than a year as a temple priest.

The details of Mukerji’s life at this point get fuzzy. There are competing stories from his autobiography, his family, and biographies prepared by his publisher, E.P. Dutton, according to Gordon Chang, a scholar at Stanford who wrote the introduction to a recent edition of Caste and Outcast. He worked in the textile industry and ended up in Japan. By one account, he'd dramatically escaped British authorities after the capture of his brother, a revolutionary. By another, he was in Japan to learn about the textile trade and recruit supporters for the Indian independence movement. In Caste and Outcast he chooses to voyage to the United States, but in another version he accepted a free meal in Yokohama, which indebted him to work as a contract laborer on a ship headed to San Francisco.

He was, he writes, instantly enamored of and disappointed with America. “No sooner did they see that I had such feelings for their country than they began to knock it out of me in a very unceremonious fashion,” he wrote.

He took odd jobs, as a dishwasher or housekeeper, and was typically fired for not knowing some basic skill, like serving soup or making a bed. In each case, however, he convinced his erstwhile employer to let him observe the task to ready him for the next job. He may have picked asparagus and hops and beets, often with the few fellow Indians he encountered. In 1910 he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley—again, there is no consensus on how he ended up there—and later transferred to Stanford, where he earned his degree. At this point the stories about his life begin to align. He fell in with socialists and anarchists, and impressed his professors. The first president of Stanford, David Starr Jordan, became a lifelong supporter and friend.

At the time, most Americans knew little of India or Hinduism beyond what they read in Kipling or heard from returning missionaries. There were simply not many Indians in the United States. Immigration from Asia was heavily restricted, and Asians wouldn’t legally be allowed to become citizens until after World War II. Mukerji was the right mind and personality at the right time; he became something of a cultural ambassador for the East, first to American intellectuals, and later to the wider public, through both his writing and exhaustive speaking tours. He found America an inspiring and frustrating place: "I found it had its vulgarity, its bitter indifference, its colossal frauds. It has made just as many mistakes as India has in her time," he wrote. "And yet there was something constructive in both of these civilizations."

At Berkeley he met, and later married, Ethel Ray Dugan, an educator. They had a son, Dhan Gopal Jr., and moved to New York, where they were a vivacious social and intellectual presence. The 1923 publication of Caste and Outcast established Mukerji’s reputation. It’s a strange autobiography, cut through with grand, mythical speech that seems pulled from Indian fables, juxtaposed with voices of brusque American folksiness and pretentious anarchists. “At its heart, Caste and Outcast is an optimistic book, reflecting the author’s own joy in writing and in discovering his own purpose in life, which was to serve as what one might call a literary missionary,” writes Chang in the introduction. “The publication of Caste and Outcast marked a turning point in American’s understanding of India.”

In his relatively brief literary career, Mukerji published 25 books, including the children’s books for which he won the most popular acclaim. These books are distinguished by wisdom and courage and life lessons, and often feature animals such as Gay-Neck and Kari the Elephant because, Mukerji said, “Animals have young souls.” The publisher E.P. Dutton wrote, “In only a few years he has jumped into public favor—and more—he has won the hearts of America’s children.”

But success did not hang well on Mukerji. He struggled with depression and anxiety, traits he shared with another prominent friend, the man who would later become India’s first prime minister, Jawarhalal Nehru. “Both were restless, driven, sensitive, and inwardly tortured,” writes Chang.

“I have been so fragile. My nerves could not and will not stand any strain. I need one whole year of the Alps. It is an awful state to be in: I need silence and I can’t get it in America,” Mukerji told friends in a letter just before a nervous breakdown. He was also a distant, remote father. Gopal, as his son was called, wrote about his father while in high school at Exeter Academy, including his struggle with “The three greeds and terrors: desire for fame and fear of oblivion; desire for money and the fear of the lack of it; and last, the desire for all the little vanities of life, and the fear of not enjoying them.”

“Success is a curse, a stumbling block in the path of a spiritual life,” Gopal added. And a spiritual life is what the increasingly isolated and stressed Mukerji had sought, unsuccessfully. Following another breakdown, on July 14, 1936, Dugan returned to their New Milford, Connecticut, home and found Mukerji hanging by his neck in the closet. He left no note, but the last thing he wrote was a letter to the Ramakrishna monastery, long the focus of his spiritual life: “You ask me to write, after reflection. I find, I am prepared. My decision has been taken, on reflection. It has been decided: I am. Who decided, you know it. I am mere instrument.”

“How can we feel regret or sorrow?” Dugan later wrote of her husband's death. “He has what he wanted—the only thing he wanted.”

There was something else that he wanted, at least in the years before his demons overtook him, and that was to have an impact on his adopted country, where he saw so much potential, and so much hazard. “He promoted Indian spirituality to address the void in America’s soul,” writes Chang. “He only wanted to help America see beyond itself.” But that peace and insight, reflected in the final words of Gay-Neck, eluded him.

Whatever we think and feel will colour what we say or do. He who fears, even unconsciously, or has his least little dream tainted with hate, will inevitably, sooner or later, translate these two qualities into his action. Therefore, my brothers, live courage, breathe courage and give courage. Think and feel love so that you will be able to pour out of yourselves peace and serenity as naturally as a flower gives forth fragrance. Peace be unto all!

The 1959 children's novel Harold and the Purple Crayon is a beloved classic, and for good reason. The book is a triumphant celebration of the power of creation and imagination. Crockett Johnson (real name, David Johnson Leisk), the cartoonist and author behind Harold, brought his protagonist's journey to life with a simple, minimalist drawing style that suggests a child might have made them. Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“They may look casual, or uncomplicated, but that is actually the result of very careful planning,” says the Johnson biographer Philip Nel, who runs an exhaustive website on the artist's life and work. In fact, Johnson was a devotee of meticulous precision. In the final decade of his life, he even produced a series of paintings inspired by the laws of geometry and mathematics. The mathematical paintings of Crockett Johnson are far less well known than his famous children's books, but no less worthy of appreciation.

That Johnson would spend his final years exploring a fine art approach to math is perhaps less surprising when looking back at the peculiar ways he integrated mathematics into his early work. It began in the 1930s, when he was drawing comics for the political publication New Masses, and later, Collier’s. His first major success came in 1942 with the creation of his comic strip, Barnaby, about a young boy (who bore a striking resemblance to the later character of Harold), and his fairy godfather. Johnson wrote and illustrated Barnaby daily until 1946, his preoccupation with precision and mathematics showing through even in this early phase of his career.

One of the most distinct features of the Barnaby comics was their typeset speech balloons. “The normal way you do a speech balloon is that you write text and then you draw the balloon around it, because you don’t know how much space the text is going to take up,” says Nel. But according to Nel, Johnson approached speech balloons the other way around. “[He] drew the balloons first and then figured out in his head about how much space he would need in the balloons, and then had them typeset," says Nel. "Not many people could do that.”

Then there was Atlas the Mental Genius, a Barnaby character. This odd guest star had a unique habit of speaking in complex algebraic equations. In the beginning, these equations were numerical nonsense, but in later printings of the strips, Johnson went back and replaced them with actual math that could be solved to “say” something. While Barnaby was a fairly sophisticated strip, the inclusion of college-level math was still an odd choice. “Mathematicians thought it was genius, but only mathematicians thought it was genius, because they were the only ones who got the joke,” says Nel.

Johnson eventually moved on to the children’s books he's best known for today, in particular the Harold series. He wrote and illustrated seven Harold titles between 1955 and 1963, all revolving around a young boy who draws worlds for himself with his magic crayon. Johnson brought his analytical eye to these charming books as well. “Each book is in fact one giant drawing that Johnson figured out in advance, and then had Harold draw, revealing his progress a page at a time. Harold does not erase, and only rarely crosses out,” says Nel.

It wasn't until after the release of his final Harold book, Harold’s ABC’s, that Johnson began working on the final great works of his life, his mathematical paintings. “He starts on those in 1965,” says Nel. “At that point, he has had a full career as a comic book artist and as a children’s book writer and artist. And the mathematical paintings are the third phase of his career.”

Working from a 1956 textbook called The World of Mathematics, Johnson took what had been implied in much of his earlier work and made it literal, painting equations and proofs as colorful geometric expressions of their math. For instance, in one of his early mathematical pieces, Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem (Euclid), precise triangles and shapes act as a visual breakdown of the famed mathematician's proof. For comparison, see below:

Relatively new to the world of fine art, Johnson created his paintings using rudimentary materials he could pick up at the hardware store. Instead of canvas, he painted on masonite boards. “He found canvas intimidating,” says Nel. Johnson even had his colors mixed at the store rather than doing it himself. “He was literally using house paint for these.”

Despite his lack of a formal advanced mathematical education, Johnson was fascinated by complex algebra. Eventually, he began experimenting with his own mathematical theorems. “He would paint versions of a problem until he arrived at a solution, and when he arrived at a solution, he would correspond with mathematicians to try and get the algebra,” says Nel.

Through his own experimentation, combining his artistic experience with his passion for math, Johnson was eventually able to publish two completely original mathematical proofs in scholarly journals. One, titled “A Construction for a Regular Heptagon,” was published in a 1975 edition of the Mathematical Gazette, providing an alternative to a proof originally credited to Archimedes.

Despite their clear skill and innovation, Johnson’s own attitude toward his mathematical works was always conflicted, as he never seemed to get comfortable enough to consider himself a fine artist. With the help of an art world friend, he was able to stage a couple of gallery shows, and according to Nel, he even sent a print to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but they weren’t interested in showing his work. Nel tells of a particular instance when a friend told Johnson that one of his paintings could sell for at least $10,000. “Johnson responded with a scornful look, saying, ‘$10,000? No! If I sold one, then it would give the others value. And if the others have value, then on my death bed, I would impoverish my heirs.’ This was a joke, because he had no children, and therefore no heirs to pay taxes on an inheritance.” Nel says that Johnson often used humor to hide his artistic insecurities.

Johnson continued to produce new mathematical paintings until his death in 1975, creating over 100 such works. He thought of them all as one cohesive piece, best understood as a single body of work, and whether out of a lack of confidence in the pieces or a true desire not to commercialize them, he never sold them. “When he died, the work was given to the Smithsonian with the understanding that they would keep it together, and not sell it,” says Nel.

Johnson is still chiefly remembered for Harold and his purple crayon, but the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History still holds 80 of Johnson’s mathematical paintings in its collection, preserving the lesser-known legacy of the artist's precise imagination.

In November of 1943, Beatrix Potter wrote a letter to her beloved cousin, Caroline Clark. Seventy-seven years old, laid up in bed with pneumonia and heart disease, Potter was doubtlessly thinking back on her long and varied career: her hundreds of landscape watercolors, her respected mycology research, and her 24 children's books, some of which, like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Two Bad Mice, were already considered classics.

In the letter, though, she didn't mention any of these. Instead, she reminisced about a very different project—longer, bolder, and entirely secret. "When I was young I already had the itch to write, without having any material to write about," she explained to Clark. "I used to write long-winded descriptions, hymns (!) and records of conversations in a kind of cipher shorthand."

Five weeks later, Potter died. As far as we know, this is the only time she ever mentioned what may well be her masterwork: a private journal, written in secret code, that she kept for over fifteen years. In it, she wrote her innermost thoughts—about art and literature, science and nature, politics and society, and her own hopes and frustrations. Its eventual publication transformed her reputation, from "brilliant children's book author" to "writer for the ages." If it weren't for one tireless, dedicated fan, we might never have seen it at all.

Potter began keeping her journal when she was about 14 years old, "apparently inspired by a united admiration of [James] Boswell and [Samuel] Pepys," as she later wrote to Clark. While those two luminaries were adult men when they started their diaries—Boswell a 22-year-old city playboy, and Pepys an up-and-coming civil servant—Potter, as a young woman in a Victorian household, was writing from a different life stage and station.

Her mother, Helen, herself constrained by social circumstances, wanted a quiet, obedient daughter—one that, when she grew older, would stay home and look after her parents. This was not a role that came naturally to Beatrix, who was adventurous, opinionated, even mischievous—the Peter Rabbit to her mother's Mr. McGregor.

The journal was a place where Potter was free. She could escape: She wrote of her efforts to memorize Shakespeare ("there is a vast amount in my head"), and related interesting facts she had picked up about the rest of the world ("Manner of catching ducks in Egypt: Man swims in the water with his head inside a hollow pumpkin and surrounded by decoy ducks, and pulls wild ones under.")

She could participate: Her entries are full of references to political events and transcripts of adult conversations. She could critique: "I say fearlessly that the Michelangelo is hideous and badly drawn," she wrote after a visit to the National Gallery. "No one will read this."

"It fulfilled a need not only to express herself, but to have something over which she, who was powerless in every other way, exercised absolute control," writes Linda Lear in her 2008 biography, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. She also presents a simpler theory: "It seems reasonable to conclude that her code writing was at least initially devised against the possibility that her mother might read it."

She may have originally imagined this unwanted audience of one. Decades later, though—after her bestselling books had brought her fame and fortune—she was keenly aware that people besides her mother would now be interested in her private thoughts. Before she died in 1943, she and her husband, the lawyer William Heelis, bequeathed their entire 4,000-acre estate to Britain's National Trust, along with her original illustrations. She failed to tell anyone about the diaries, though, or to provide for their translation. "[They were] exasperating and absurd compositions," she wrote in the letter to Clark. "I am now unable to read [them] even with a magnifying glass."

So when Stephanie Duke, a younger relation of Potter's, came across what she described as "a large bundle of loose sheets and exercise books written in cipher-writing" in the late author's home in 1952, she wasn't quite sure what to make of them herself. She did know who to ask for help, though—Leslie Linder, a close friend and neighbor of hers, and the biggest Potter fan around.

Linder grew up in the Lake District in Cumbria, the landscape that inspired much of Potter's work. Like most Potter aficionados, he got his first taste of the author's books at the tender age of seven, when he was given early copies of several of her books, including The Tale of Peter Rabbit. His father, though, gave them away. It took decades before he rediscovered Potter, at age 40, and fell in love with her work all over again. Along with his sister, Enid, and with the help of his family's vast personal fortune, he began buying up Potter's work at estate sales and auctions.

"The love of Potter's work triggered the desire to know more about the lady who created it," says Andrew Wiltshire, an acquaintance of Linder's and the author of a biography of him, Beatrix Potter's Secret Code-Breaker. The Linders began collecting other Potter ephemera—not just artworks, but letters, drafts, and other ephemera. When Duke approached Leslie about the sheaf of inscrutable papers, he jumped at the chance to take a look. "He was the kind of man who would say 'Yes please!'" Linder says. "He wouldn't need to be asked twice."

As codes go, Potter's wasn't inordinately complicated. As Wiltshire explains, it was a "mono-alphabetic substitution cipher code," in which each letter of the alphabet was replaced by a symbol—the kind of thing they teach you in Cub Scouts. The real trouble was Potter's own fluency with it. Se quickly learned to write the code so fast that each sheet looked, even to Linder's trained eye, like a maze of scribbles.

Her handwriting could be minuscule—at times there were thousands of words squeezed onto a single page. It didn't help that, when she turned 20, she destroyed much of her earliest—and likely clearest—work, writing by way of explanation that "it is rather appalling to find one was such a goose only three years since."

She also prioritized production over organization, in that way that is common among children and artists (of which Potter was, of course, both). She didn't confine herself to notebooks. She wrote all over anything she had at hand. In one case, she repurposed an entire French dictation textbook; she ripped out the pages and pasted in her own coded reviews of museum exhibitions.

She even availed herself of a prescient shorthand: "Occasionally [numbers] were used as parts of words, such as '4get' or '2gether'," Linder later wrote.

It was a tough task. For five years, Linder pulled out his pile of pages, looked over them, and filed them away again with a sigh. "By Easter 1958, I was beginning to think somewhat sadly that these code-written sheets would remain a mystery for ever," he remembered later. That Monday, April 7, he decided to give himself a final crack at them. He pulled a sheet at random from his stack. There, near the bottom of the page, was something decipherable at last: the Roman numerals XVI, and the year 1793.

To which sixteenth person had something happened in 1793? He fruitlessly flipped through a Dictionary of Dates. He then turned to a more appropriate ally, a children's encyclopedia, which told him: "Louis XVI, French King; born Versailles 1754; guillotined Paris 1793." "Here at last was a possible clue!" he wrote.

Louis XVI's presence helped him puzzle out a nearby word: "execution." He then knew the symbols for eight letters of the alphabet, including four vowels. He pulled out an earlier sheet, written in a relatively clear hand, and the rest of the day passed in a rush of small revelations. "By midnight on that memorable Easter Monday practically the whole of Beatrix Potter's code-alphabet had been solved," he wrote.

The real labor, though, had just begun. "Working out the shapes of her words using the alphabet … took [Linder] four years," says Wiltshire. Linder was careful to get Potter's thoughts and observations exactly right. If she wrote of a plant she had seen, he checked with a local botanist. When she described journeying to a particular place, he traced the route on a map, and occasionally traveled there himself. Any mention of a work of art sent him running to an old exhibition catalog.

Had Linder not enjoyed a very particular lifestyle—all other labor optional, a house run by a team of full-time servants—he would have never have been able to do it, Wiltshire says: "He had the time to just look at the pages, and wonder, 'What on earth does this scribble mean?'"

As he carefully worked through the translation, page by page and year by year, Linder was conscious of his status as the first person to have ever seen the thoughts recorded there. "It appears that even her closest friends knew nothing of this code-writing," he wrote. "She never spoke of it." In this private space, he grew to appreciate his favorite artist as an individual. "It was strange how one forgot about Beatrix Potter the author of the Peter Rabbit books," he wrote, "and became conscious of a charming person called Miss Potter."

Of course, those two people were one and the same. Potter's diary is full of hints at her future as an artist and writer. "I can't settle to anything but my painting, I lost my patience over everything else," she wrote at the end of one particularly agitated page. Plenty of entries close with the name of a book she had recently finished, or contain one of her signature, detailed, occasionally brutal art reviews.

Later, she and her brother, Walter Bertram, started designing and selling Christmas cards, decorated with illustrations of their pet rabbit, "that charming rascal Benjamin Bouncer." "What an investment that rabbit has been in spite of the hutches," she wrote, after a particularly lucrative sale.

There are also plenty of excited accounts of the natural world—descriptions of long walks, succinct weather reports, and tales of animals she knew and loved. Beatrix and Walter Bertram were constantly filling their home with wild friends. Besides Benjamin, the journal pays close attention to "Prince the chestnut horse," a pair of lizards named Toby and Judy, and a green frog, Punch, who "has been on extensive journeys."

"I think she was in many respects the sweetest animal I ever knew," Potter wrote in 1886 after the death of one mouse, whom she referred to as both "Miss Mouse" and "Xarifa." The late pet showed up many times in Potter's sketches, and there is a character called "Xarifa" in The Fairy Caravan, published a full 43 years after its namesake's death

As she grew older, Potter began to think about sharing her written insights with more people. On August 31, 1894, she journaled for the first time about searching for mushrooms—a pursuit that would grow to occupy more and more of her time over the next few years, as she grew increasingly interested in mushroom reproduction. "Beatrix Potter's Journal ended on the 31st January, 1897, when at the age of thirty she was about to submit a Paper to the Linnaean Society of London," Linder later wrote.

Although she eventually withdrew that particular paper, after realizing some of her samples were contaminated, she never returned to her code. After fifteen years and thousands of pages written in secret, she was ready to communicate in a way that others could understand.

It took Linder nine years to decode Potter's journals. In 1966, they were published by Frederick Warne Ltd. as The Journal of Beatrix Potter. Up to that point, critics had mostly considered Potter "a writer of bunny rabbit tales" and not much else, says Wiltshire. The journal showed that she was much more—an inquisitive spirit with a sense of humor and a great gift for language, and a keen observer of Victorian life.

Linder kept collecting and thinking about Potter for the remainder of his life. By the time of his death, in 1973, he had filled two room-sized safes in his house with Potter art, papers, and ephemera. He left it all to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where it lives on as the Linder Bequest, Archive and Collection. The consensus among experts is that, were it not for Linder's work, Potter would be much less well known today, says Wiltshire: "Since 1966 over 100 books have been written about Beatrix, and they've all either drawn on information from the archive, the Journal, or the other two books, about Beatrix, that Leslie and Enid wrote in 1955 and 1970."

"If he hadn't spent all this time [translating], those pages would have remained in a cupboard, forgotten," says Wiltshire. And if she hadn't spent even longer writing it, we would have missed out on a great gift from this "writer of bunny rabbit tales"—thousands of pages of very human thought.