A few years ago I was doing research on witchcraft at the QEII Library at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The librarian told me that I was unlikely to find much, as anything on the topic they put out on the shelves was stolen almost immediately. True enough; almost everything from Malleus Maleficarum down to modern glossy books on the topic had disappeared.

My wife made a similar object a few years ago to complement her Xmas village...she took a bunch of detritus from the kids' toybox....wayward Legos, discarded Polly Pocket carcasses, miscellaneous effluvia without apparent function or name, and glued the whole thing to a styrofoam cone, then painted it gold, making a most unusual Xmas tree. It actually looked rather nice against the colored lights.

This immediately made me think of Mann's "Mephisto". Everything old is new again.