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.
This illustration of a coffee octopus (or, er, quintopus?) is from a 1901 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. The caption reads: "School teacher. Pulled down hill."
An illustration from an 1853 issue of Harper's magazine (vol. 7, p. 573). The caption reads: "Appearance of things in general to a gentleman who has just turned a complete somersault. * &c., &c., Represent Sparks of Divers Beautiful Colors." A better scan is from Drawings by John Leech, 1909.
"Surprising, but true ... just as the individual life must reimagine the lost worlds of its childhood, so the collective life of even the modern world itself is built out of, and requires, a retelling of stories of its collective parts." —Charles Lemert, Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life (2011)
"'Now you'll have something to write about,' she said one afternoon in the kitchen, apropos of nothing, talking without talking at all about the terrible thing that was happening to her as, instead, a terrible thing that was happening to me." —Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake (2012)
An illustration from a 1919 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. The caption reads: "It took him less than ten minutes to reduce the trunk to a mass of splinters."
The entirety of history: "nothing, something, something, something, maybe something, nothing, something, something, something, something and not at once, something, something, assuredly there must be something, nothing." —William Keckler