CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
Responding to our proof that all mirrors are magic mirrors, that reflections are real, and that we can literally drink the moon and the knowledge of the moon from a liquid mirror, George writes:
F-----------ck….that’s genius!
What a trip!!! In act one I couldn’t keep my eyes off of your glistening glasses but also not off of the marvellous multi-colored moon. Switching between the two gave me an instant high.
Act two brought a big smile on my face. The moon appearing, vibrating on the rhythm of your words, then disappearing again was a nice three act play all within itself.
“Lighting a candle never hurts” was put into practice when you helped me get to the end by leaving me in the worldly dark after lightning a fire within.
Truly beautiful! Can’t wipe the smile off of my face.
These are the best New Year's resolutions we've ever encountered, explaining why one shouldn't get up early, should spend more money on oneself, should drink more, should live beyond one's means, should gamble, and should look out for No. 1. From The Idler, 1894.
Quimby's Bookstore NYC knows that some books are best lit by a cloven-footed lamp. Owner Steven Svymbersky writes: "Just got in a fine selection of the esoteric and amusing books by Prof. Oddfellow. Special."
In the second photo, our display table is on the right.
This fine indie bookstore welcomes heart-clicks over at Instagram:
i love your blog description*--playful yet deep and intellectually curious--and the content is endlessly weird and fun and insightful. you're so interesting!
*I am an Attendant of the Borgesian Circulating Depository. Duties: 1. honoring visionary ancients who were centuries or millennia before their time; 2. tilting the game board so as to cast everything in a new light; 3. celebrating allegory and metaphor as scenic shortcuts to wisdom; 4. discovering the macrocosm in the microcosm; 5. measuring non-material forces which nonetheless carry weight (Umberto Eco); 6. tracking extraordinary tempests in mundane teacups; 7. finding mystical analogues to scientific breakthroughs—putting the super into the natural, the other into the worldly, the meta into the physical, the para into the normal, the magical into realism; 8. puzzling over hidden, deeper meaning; 9. carrying the key, even when the lock has been lost; 10. identifying archetypes at play; 11. studying the legend, even when the map is blank; 12. searching through the deepest shadows for the bright light that cast them; 13. delving into the unfathomable in wordless awe of the inexplicable; 14. photographing background images for the insides of mystery boxes; 15. offering the inscrutable its due scrutiny; 16. endowing branches of Borgesian catacombs; 17. diagramming the sacred syllables in the mumbo jumbo; 18. believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast; 19. building 3D models of M.C. Escher's visual illusions; 20. crafting something out of nothing; 21. designing floor plans for memory palaces; 15. plundering cultural detritus; 16. bringing warmth to fuzzy logic; 17. looking through trompe l'oeil windows; 18. freeing radicals; 19. centering on marginalia; 20. navigating the ocean that roars within the seashell; 21. making the past perfect and the future less tense; 22. seeking a grand unification of hard science, soft science, and ethereal science; 23. resisting the belligerence of ignorance; 24. erecting signs on dotted lines; 25. taking a stand for poetic justice; 26. tracing constellations in the starry-eyed; 27. fighting to cure anhedonia; 28. getting in stitches over how many angels can dance on the point of a needle; 29. exploring intangible powers, from those celebrated by the world's great religions to square roots to the literary tradition (Umberto Eco); 30. directing good brain power to fanciful ends.
"It is the custom here that we go just a little beyond, that we consider each direction with the possibilities of madness and its grand, all-inclusive theatrics, where even minor dreams are worth their weight in gold, when balanced against the darkness out of which they have gestated and taken their cues from the fiercest and loveliest of all the animals." —J. Karl Bogartte
The Twinkling Effort of a Falling Star, to Relieve the Cheshire Full Moon, From Those Clouds, Obesities and Excrescencies, Which Deprive a Most Valuable Part of the Creation of Her Beneficial Light by James Gatliff, 1820.
