The fellows and ladies arrayed before you are but conjurations, dreamt into being by my peculiar alliance with artificial intelligence. They stand bold, they grapple lustily, yet not one among them ever trod the earth in flesh. Each figure is fashioned to embody a man or woman of full and lawful age, no less than twenty one years. I, being myself long past the threshold of one-and-twenty, do present this gallery to adult eyes alone, for those who relish visions where art and appetite clasp hands in secret merriment.

Though my chambers are ever open to kindred spirits, I must confess a few rules by which I keep my gallery in good order:

- Blank walls do not entice me; those who bring no offerings of their own art shall find the latch turned against them.

- Any whiff of juvenilia, or traffic in under-aged subjects, is met with the swiftest expulsion. On this point I am as unbending as steel.

- Companions who have slumbered for more than two years I take as departed, and so I quietly withdraw my attentions.

- And as for those who merely pilfer from the vast jumble of the web, serving me second-hand scraps—I bar them without ceremony.

Thus may my collection remain a salon of honest labour, noble physique, and merry mischief, unsullied by the counterfeit or the unseemly.

—H. Tallstaff