Just inside the entryway stood a walking stick with a man’s tiny numbered head for a knob. “Do any of you guys know what phrenology is?” asked the tour guide, a young woman named Lila. “By now, of course, we know that connecting the lumps and bumps of a person’s skull to their inner personality traits is a total pseudoscience,” Lila said. The walking stick, she explained, was a reference to, you guessed it, Orson Squire Fowler, the octagon superfan who had inspired the gleaming bauble in which we stood. Not unlike an interior-design version of the game “Telephone”).

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Persons: ”, Lila, “, ” Lila, Orson Squire Fowler