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You know how the Dictionary Game turns a serious reference book into a gaming generator; the dictionary is playfully transformed from a tool for decoding puzzling words into a puzzle-making machine, where whimsically fake definitions take the stage. But could any book, spontaneously pulled off the shelf, be transformed into a playfulness machine? Could one's entire home library be a gaming center? That's the lofty goal of Machinarium Verbosus: it offers, among other oddities, cut-out paper spectacles for seeing more than is readily apparent in any book.
The poet W. B. Keckler describes our book as a "very humorous series of essays, experiments and actual OBJECTS (?!) all addressing metaphysical ideas in literature--but in an EXTREMELY playful way. I LOVE this book."
The theorist of playfulness, Bernie De Koven, says this: "'Scholarly fun' seems to be a good name for it. Esoteric fun, like that of poets and etymologists and students of the arcane. The fun of playing with the obscure, the esoteric, the knowledge shared by the well-read few. A kind of fun that, in playing with all but forgotten lore, keeps it alive for those of us who some day may care."
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