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.
"No thoughtful person, looking over yon spangled heaven with astrologic eye, but must see that we are living in peculiar times, and that every returning day is fraught with importance." From The Royal Kalendar by Francis Moore, 1853.
The text reads: "Above us the stars, dim as dust in their Babylonian multitudes, pulled through the dark along the whorls of an enormous vortex—for that is what it is, I have seen it in pictures—were invisible, and the moon was long down. —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping"
An illustration from Bohemian Paris of To-day by William Chambers Morrow andillustrated by Édouard Cucuel (1899). The caption reads: "In the passage to the death chamber."