On July 18, 1874, Carroll was out walking when a sentence suddenly popped into his head: “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.” Most people would immediately wonder: What’s a Snark?

Ogden Nash regularly contributed verse to The New Yorker for more than forty years. His last poem in the magazine was published the week after his death, in 1971. The Colorado congresswoman’s ...

QUOT;BOOJUM--DEAD AHEAD!" I chirp into the C.B. Like a 30-foot-long unfurling tentacle of some submerged gargantuan squid, a mid-size boojum breaks the horizon of the Baja desert. After we spy the ...