Who said that? When did that happen? Where the heck does that thing come from? Was that French, or what? What's that supposed to mean?

For 35 years, librarians in the United States and other countries sent puzzles they could not solve locally to "The Exchange," a column for reference librarians appearing in RQ (and later, RUSQ), the official journal of the Reference and User Services Division of the ALA. Other readers often furnished the answers--sometimes years or even decades later Puzzles and Essays from "The Exchange" organizes those perplexing questions and answers into a...