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.
"What an intriguing, fun, lovely book with Oddfellow's usual quirky, oblique poetic, metaphysic dry humour and bibliophillic joie de livre. " —Gary Barwin, author ofYiddish for Pirates
This Book is a Cactus turned out to be the most difficult project we've ever tackled. We wanted to recreate the very first computer game we programmed, from back in the 1980s—the Tamagotchi precursor of a virtual flower—but this time in book form. What we ended up with is a combination choose-your-own-adventure and puzzle book; it's a surrealistic virtual reality experience you hold in your hands, as the book is also a cactus that you attempt to keep alive. A hybrid cactus-book. Each page is like a square on a game board. You make decisions and solve riddles, and your choices/answers lead to different squares. Math puzzles, word puzzles, logic puzzles, and riddles appear at intervals within the fractal storyline.
"It may surprise you at the amount of information that flows through Twitter as well as the relationships that are forged with those 140 characters." —The Everything Wedding Book
If you fled Twitter like we did, let's all just blame the evil "Commander," as portrayed by Saiki Shigeru in Kanpai Senshi After V.
Clive Bell suggested that "Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life" (Art, 1914). Our photo is courtesy of the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives.
Who says fortune tellers give vague predictions? These postcards from the mid-1930s even show a photo of one's future spouse, and they're brutally honest (down to the monkey child one might be destined to raise).
"I had to make my getaway between two suns. There was no other horse nor time," said Billy the Kid (The West of Billy the Kid by Frederick Nolan). Here's what a horse of two suns looks like, from Archiv für Physiologie, 1877.