The weather of this almanack does not occur in the conventional sense. Rather, it is proposed: a cumulus is drawn first as an outline, then voted upon by the Fellows present, then permitted to convene over the lavender district between three and four in the afternoon. A drizzle, once endorsed, is held to a strict programme of fifteen minutes, after which it disperses with a small bow. The Junior Fellow will note, in plate III, that the birds counterfeit in this region tend to arrive only after the rain has been ratified.

No coinage in this register has ever been minted, yet several have been refused. The half-florin of Cumulia, depicted, was rejected by the imaginary Bureau on account of the profile, which the engraver had drawn in a fit of pastel sympathy. The unit of account in these economies is the aroma: one fresh marzipan is reckoned equivalent to three rumours of citron. The Fellows hold that any currency must be soft enough to fold into a letter, and quiet enough not to wake the cat.

The magpie shown opposite is, the Fellows must concede, not a magpie. Its tail has been replaced, sometime between the second and third proofs, by a triangular wedge of lavender paper, and its right wing eclipsed by a coral semicircle. The Society holds that this is no falsification, but a courtesy: the original bird, being imaginary, preferred the substitution. The Junior Fellow is asked to note that the eye, however, is the bird's own, and watches.

Above the lavender district, three moons turn, of which two are pressed sugar and one is, almost certainly, a marzipan citron. The Society has erred in earlier editions by naming the third "lemon," and the correction appears at the volume's close. The orbit charted here is approximate; bodies of confection do not commit to ellipses but rather suggest them, in the way a parlour pianist suggests a tune one cannot quite place.

No clockwork in the Society's possession ticks. They chime, instead, and only on Tuesdays, and always slightly off-key — this is by design, the Senior Fellow remarks, as a properly imaginary mechanism must never present itself as authoritative on the matter of time. The gear above turns once each calendar year, dragging its smaller companion three-eighths of a revolution behind. The pendulum, when set in motion, prefers a long, dignified, and ultimately fictitious silence.

Aromas are not, in the strict view of the Society, the property of any one person. The citron above, decanted into a small green-glass apothecary bottle, has been borrowed from the lemon orchard of an imagined province, and is to be returned at the close of the month, having been politely inhaled by no fewer than nine Junior Fellows. The Bureau keeps a ledger of these loans, and pursues defaulters with a small, faintly perfumed note. So far, no defaulter has been definitively located.

The comet plotted opposite has refused, on each of its three recorded passes, to provide a name. The Society has therefore filed it under anonyma, in the manner of an Edwardian short story whose author preferred to remain a vague rumour. It is the opinion of the Junior Fellow Smithers that the comet's tail comprises, almost entirely, a faint dust of misremembered postcards. We do not dispute him, though the Senior Fellow has annotated the margin with a small, polite question mark.

The catastrophes filed in this volume are small. They are catalogued at all only because the Senior Fellow holds that any disaster, properly observed, contains an exact mirror of the universe at the moment of its happening. The teacup above — fractured by no detectable force, on a Wednesday, in clear weather — sustained a craquelure later proved identical to the orbit of the third moon (see Plate IV, with the corresponding correction). With this final plate, the Junior Fellow's induction concludes. The folio is returned, unmarked, to the calfskin sleeve. Mint side up.