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.
Speaking of the acronym LOA, the loa are the mysterious intermediary spirits of Haitian Vodou. From the Aurora publication of the Agnes Scott Institute, 1897.
Two books on the market purport to provably read the minds of their readers: Clive Barker’s horror novel Mister B. Gone and Anthemion Buckram’s grimoire The Young Wizard’s Hexopedia. You could tell the person who has everything that this book pairing gift suggested itself.
This is how we imagine the yearbook at the witch's coven masquerading as a ballet school in the great film Suspiria. Here are nine surprisingly occult illustrations from the Iris yearbook of Ward Seminary, 1906. You'll recall that the iris flower figures importantly in Suspiria. See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.
"If the time should come when you would fain have the love of some other man, then use this second bottle," from "The Witch of Walworth," Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses, 1892.