Regular readers may remember Dr. Boli’s collection of hands from Google Books. He has many fine examples, monochrome and in color, of scanned librarians’ hands. But not one comes close, as a work of ironical art, to this hand from  A Progressive Drawing Book for Beginners by Philip Henry Delamotte.

 

 

The caption contest was a great success, in that it made Dr. Boli’s readers work much harder than Dr. Boli. A great deal of entertaining cleverness was on display, and Dr. Boli has begun to wonder whether, for the sake of the Magazine, he ought simply to let the readers take over.

The judging of the contest, however, did constitute real work, and for that reason Dr. Boli decided to have it done by somebody else. In fact he left it up to the loyal reader who had suggested the contest in the first place. She did not look at the comments as they came in, and so had no idea who offered which caption; she was given a numbered list of entries with no other identification, and picked her favorite without prejudice. Here, then, is the winner:

The book will soon be on its way to “Bill,” with Dr. Boli’s personal thanks for his contribution. And since the contest is over, Dr. Boli can now reveal the caption he had prepared before his loyal reader suggested a contest:

A rare interview with Dr. Boli has been published at the Catholic Book Blogger’s site. Interviews with Dr. Boli are rare, not because Dr. Boli is unwilling to speak, but because it is rare for an interviewer to sit still long enough to hear out Dr. Boli’s measured and thoughtful answers to his questions. This interview, however, is exceptionally rare, because it also includes answers from another author, “Christopher Bailey,” who—the time has come to admit it—is a fictional character made up solely for Dr. Boli’s own amusement.