You find the damnedest things in used bookstores

I was skimming Kottke, and I saw a bit that said:

Photos of a Masonic handbook from 1920 called King Solomon and His Followers -- A Valuable Aid to the Memory. The text is written in shorthand.

That sounds interesting, I thought, and went to check it out. As the Flickr page loaded, I wondered to myself, "What if… nah, not a chance. That would be waaay too coincidental."

When the page loaded, though, it turned out that it was not too coincidental— the cool Masonic book from 1920, written all in code, that he has? I've got one, also. I remember getting it at a used bookstore in Laguna Beach, which means that it must have been sometime between 1980-1985. It's somewhere around the house, I'm sure, in a box somewhere.

Now that he's got some info about how to translate it, I'll have to see if I can dig up my copy.

A rejoinder…

Regarding Dori's post below, my answer to her question is "Because most of this social networking stuff is a fucking huge waste of time, even when wrapped in a veneer of productivity." The funny thing is that Dori and I agree that I'm more social than she is in real life. But in the virtual world, she belongs to a zillion of these things, while I'm poking along with Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook, and I hardly ever check the latter two. I just don't have time.

I found that the only way I could handle Twitter was to ruthlessly police and prune the list of people I follow, so that I kept interruptions to a minimum. And even then, when I'm working, I turn off Twitteriffic, switch my chat message to "Working, IM with care," and sometimes even quit Entourage. My problem with social networking is that it wants to be, well, social, and clamors for my time and attention. That's already in short supply.