My sister Catherine has a knack for finding ideal birthday gifts for me in old book stores and flea markets. My tastes are quirky, and I don’t discuss them with her a lot, yet she invariably nails them. It’s as if she wrote on a shopping list “Hunt down obscure volumes of early 20th century pop culture for Chris.”
This year the haul included:
• The Improper Bohemians, Allen Churchill’s 1959 history of the radical art (and just plain radical) movement in Greenwich Village. Admittedly, I’ve read and owned this book a few times in my life, but never with these bizarre markings on the title page:

• Six Curtains for Strogonova, the last book in Brahms & Simon’s series of comic mystery novels about the Stroganova Ballet company. One of those unassuming orange-and-white Penguin Books editions, not one of the cartoony-cover reissues from the 1980s.

• A poster celebrating cartoonists and comics writers who hailed from Oklahoma. Here’s a scan of the upper half of the thing; what the cropping mainly misses is Bill Mauldin in an Army private’s uniform standing in a foxhole at the feet of Chester Gould (in yellow Dick Tracy coat, natch):

• a souvenir newspaper (“The Daily Herald”) published by the Outgamie County Historical Society in Applewood, Wisconsin. Applewood was the birthplace of Harry Houdini. The lead story in the eight-page paper concerns the magician’s death, and the rest of it is devoted to his life and tricks, including an award-winning article on “Harry Houdini and Wisconsin” by Kimberly Louagie.

My daughters recently, and independently, became big Houdini fans, largely due to Sid Fleischman’s biography Escape! The Story of The Great Houdini and Jason Lutes & Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novel Houdini The Handcuff King (though the more grown-up Houdini: Art and Magic by Brooke Kamin Rapaport has also had an impact.). So this was that sort of mystically timely gift that my sister Catherine has become known for.