The best reason to reopen an old book is the thing you can't believe is in it. These are the entries that made us stop and read them aloud to whoever was nearby.
Killikelly's Curious Questions (1900) devotes an earnest entry to 'The Mkodos and the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar' — a famous newspaper hoax that had, by then, been solemnly cited for twenty years. The same volume covers comets, calendars and six famous diamonds.
Volume II of Curious Questions answers which animals various traditions admit to paradise. The Victorians indexed everything, including the afterlife's pet policy.
The book's question index is a cabinet of curiosities by itself — alongside the skull cup: 'Did Tom Thumb kill Haydon?', 'Who found Pliny's doves?', and 'What poet wrote as his own epitaph, Here lies one whose name was writ in water?' The answers are all inside.
The Conundrums book scripts entire evenings: conundrum suppers, floral games, riddles on George Washington, and 'telegrams' as a parlor game. Home entertainment, before entertainment came to the home.