My Dear Oddfellow, I collect Tamagotchi. Nobody wants them anymore and they thrive in thrift stores like your century flower. Especially the stuffed ones. Many of them are uncircumcized and can be worked in and out of a pouch they zipper down into. Their necks are Tamagotchi prepuces. They are known for their dearth of facial features which may be, alas, the future.

Now I will believe there are unicorns.

They lay their heads upon the laps of virgins.

Why are there no unicorns near me?

"They flee from me that sometime did me seek..."

Poets invented the unicorn, the centaur and the phoenix because they are the unicorn, the centaur and the phoenix.

Alas.

Also, they exist to say alas.

Alas.

No- thank YOU! I have been unicorn-obsessed from a very early age, and am still reeling from the discovery of your breathtaking Field Guide.

I work for a public library and am now trying to ensure we have at least one copy of every book you've written. Really enchanting, thought-provoking work.

Now I'm unicorn AND Craig Conley-obsessed.

By golly, if there’s a unicorn to be detected anywhere in the Pittsburgh vicinity, you bet I’m all over it.  No unicorn is going to waltz undetected beneath MY nose.

U is for the Unicorn,
Who lived in mythic fantasies of old.
            This beast was born
            With just a single horn,
A total count of one, all told.
Alas, the Unicorn’s no more:
To moderns, who learn science in the crib,
            The myths of yore
            Are nothing but a bore;
The Unicorn is just a fib.

G. B. Stern, in her delightful book Monogram ... tells of her rage, about three years ago, at learning that there were no such animals as unicorns.

All her life she had simply taken it for granted that there were unicorns. "That there should not be is plainly silly," she says. "Who can deny that there are zebras? And zebras are even striped, which is absurd. Well, then, there must be unicorns or how are we to manage?"

I think that possibly Miss Stern is a little too upset right now to look at the lack of unicorns in its right perspective. Her desperate cry of "or how are we to manage?" is born of the suddenness of the whole thing's breaking on her like this. In a year or two Time, the Great Kidder, will have fooled her into thinking that we are managing all right without unicorns, and only occasionally will she wince when looking at the "By Royal Appointment" signs.