The books were lucid, funny (even silly) and outrageously padded with reproductions of old woodcuts, engravings, advertisements, movie stills and so forth.

She notes that her wooden coffee table - with its narrow, pointed ends - reminds her of old woodcuts of the hulls of slave ships.

"Good one," I said aloud, unable to fend off the mental image of those old woodcuts depicting a personified Death hovering over crying children as they watched their fathers' sore-covered bodies stacked onto a wheelbarrow.

He was the dead image of the sun in old woodcuts, his hair and whiskers answering for rays all around him.

Happily, though, the main narrative is supplemented by numerous old woodcuts and sidebar profiles of famous and obscure astronomers.

The book turned out to be a facsimile edition of an eighteenth-century work, complete with antique spelling and clumsy old woodcuts that looked more quaint than scary.

Beth Krommes's exquisite scratchboard artwork has the textured look of old woodcuts, and is rendered in a subtle, naturalistic palette of black and white, shaded with hues of ochre and soft moss green.

The passenger cab has been altered, but old woodcuts and surviving details indicate that it rose in an open cage surrounded by the main staircase.

Chase's illustrates this with an old woodcut that she said showed "a guy with rats hanging off his head."

Their faces were harsh and angular, gouged with lines and shadows that made them look like something from a stark old woodcut.