The Marquess of Volesbury-Lowbottom collects right-footed argyle socks, but only if they are made of more than 58 per cent polyester.

By covering the soil in his planters with fine mesh, turning the pots upside-down and hanging them from wires attached to the drainage holes, and installing a strong daylight-spectrum lamp on the floor below the plants, Mr. Robin Makeweather has created an Australian tropical forest in his basement.

Ms. Anna Maria Czerniewniec keeps an album of unsolicited commercial mail documenting more than 285 ways of misspelling her name.

Mr. Emsworth Barker Praed has built every proposition in Euclid’s Elements out of ramen noodles. He has now begun work on Lobachevsky.

The poet Evelina Grock, an avid collector of rejection letters, was saddened and disappointed when a perfectly awful poem she had submitted to the New Yorker was accepted for publication. She was able to obtain her rejection letter after all, however, by sending a revised version of the poem with one hundred thirty-eight added lines in praise of Adolf Hitler.

Are you ready for a career in marketing? Consider these real-life situations and see how close you come to making the correct marketing decision.

Let us suppose that you are a seller of toothpaste to the grateful masses, and let us suppose that your toothpaste comes in a five-ounce tube, which is packaged in a cardboard box. How can you convince the wary consumer in the store that your toothpaste is a bargain?

Yes, that should do it: “25% FREE.” You are not just getting five ounces of toothpaste: you are getting one more ounce than you would if you bought four ounces at the same price. This is time-honored marketing logic.

Now let us suppose the bean-counters have counted their beans and come up one bean short, and it is determined that your company will sell tubes of toothpaste in a cardboard box of exactly the same dimensions, but with only four ounces inside instead of five. How will you, the marketer, label these boxes to show at a glance that, though they occupy the same space on the shelf, they have less toothpaste inside?