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.
We just discovered that the same year we published How to Be Your Own Cat, one Katerina Sidorova wrote How to Stop Being Human: Guidelines for Becoming a Squirrel. (Select pages of the squirrel book are scanned here. You can peek inside the cat book here.) Something is in the air!
A statue holds a book with no title, the book never having been written about an event that left no discernible trace. From My Father's Bonus March by Adam Langer, 2009.
"I'd sooner have a mouthful of cold mutton sitting on a chair, than a whole Yorkshire pie in a coal-hole" is another thing you'll never hear a vegetarian say. From English Illustrated, 1894.
The cartoonist labeled the earth and Atlas as if we wouldn't know what they were. By Robert Carter for the N.Y. Evening Sun, reproduced in Cartoons magazine, 1914.