Just 23 years ago Benoit Mandelbrot published his famous picture of the Mandelbrot set, but that picture has changed our view of the mathematical and physical universe. In this text, Mandelbrot offers 25 papers from the past 25 years, many related to the famous inkblot figure. Of historical interest are some early images of this fractal object produced with a crude dot-matrix printer. The text includes some items not previously published.