Two Illustrations from 'Everyday Information'

I could post gems from this for the rest of my days. "How many of those people" R. Ewart Williams asks, on characteristically polemic form in the introduction, "who try to make up their minds whether to live in the town or in the country know the real advantages and disadvantages of each?"

We open with a typical twentieth century quandry: which is the rattle, which the whistle?

It tells us in the caption that "the modern police whistle was not used till the end of the nineteenth century." Why stop there? Why leave the reader thirsting for further knowledge, with that tantalising phrase "The modern police whistle" alluding to all manner of pre-modern whistles?

I've just spent a good fifteen minutes trying to get the hang of my new second language, semaphore. Isn't there some kind of circular problem though, with the flag that reads, "I am going to send a message by semaphore"?