Salvador Dali brings surrealism to the masses at New York's 1939 World's Fair.

Elizabeth Lowry of the Wall Street Journal has a fun article about Jessica Kerwin Jenkins’ Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, a new book that seems right up the alley of language-loving, factoid-obsessed Afflictor readers. It’s an idiosyncratic reference book in which Jenkins, a writer for Vogue, offers histories on milk baths, the word “hello,” and cloud names, among other topics. An excerpt about what Lowry considers the book’s most offbeat entry:

Salvador Dali and friend in 1939. (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)

“The most outré entry of all, however, is the one on things ‘subaquatic,’ which includes a delirious description of Salvador Dalí’s deranged installation at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Dalí’s underwater artwork, called the Dream of Venus, was a ‘panorama of the unconscious,’ the artist explained. Inside a grotto, visitors found a topless actress lying on a vast bed of red satin strewn with lobsters and champagne bottles. Behind her in a giant aquarium, glimpsed through a window, naked women posing as mermaids with rubber tail fins, the artist’s ‘living liquid ladies,’ played a woman-shaped piano and tapped away at floating rubber typewriters.

Time magazine dubbed the performers ‘Lady Godivers.’ When World’s Fair officials insisted that Dalí get rid of an image advertising the performance—a reworking of Botticelli’s Venus with a fish-head torso—he retaliated by hiring a plane and pelting the city with copies of a manifesto called the ‘Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness.’ It is a man’s right, he wrote, ‘to love women with ecstatic fish heads.'”