Sorry for the lack of meat in this potato stew. My mind seems to be one track only, especially when trying to produce a book. Anyway, let me try to catch everyone up to where we are right now.

Last week, on Halloween, I spent the day digging through the stacks of Waseda library for books, any books, on New Orleans. I ran into one in particular, an 1885 first edition of a book called Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans Illustrated. A title which is almost as long as ours, but not quite.

This was definitely a very lucky and unlikely find. Why, you may ask, is an 1885 first edition of a New Orleans travel guide in the stacks of a Japanese library? Because one of the contributors of the book just happens to be Lafcadio Hearn, everyone's favorite old tyme writer and obsessor over Japan. One of the first true Japanophiles before manga and anime ushered in the new guys.

This is a beautiful old book. Frail. The binding is cracked, and pages are on the verge of falling out. The text is miniscule by today's standards — in the 300-plus pages of this tome is enough content to fill 800 of a modern book. Rational leading, type size and line length ratios be damned.

In between these shedding, yellowed pages are a dozen or so incredibly detailed engravings of street scenes from New Orleans. A swamp. A cafe for the damned. An old church with women in puffy 19th-century European-style dresses out back. The moment I cracked the book open and saw the first spread — a scene of two men dueling with foils, each with one arm behind his back, I knew we had to include these in Do You Know. For historical posterity, if nothing else. Well, and I love engravings.