A few weeks ago I received this odd little book in the mail. There was no return address. It’s apparently written by a rich German maniac, and the endorsements on the back of the book are the best:
There is a web site devoted to this book.
I can’t figure out why they chose to send it to ME!
I just found an old thread about this book! But nobody seemed to know about the nutcase who wrote it.
One came to our house recently. We have been leafing through it and mocking it.
The premise of the book is that “pro-evo” is good and we should encourage it. By “pro-evo” the author means things that “evolve” in the right direction, the evolution itself being not the Darwin kind but rather gradual inadvertant change.
So, the author is saying that when things seem to gradually tend to change in a good direction, that’s a good thing.
Even in the hard-to-picture scenario where this point is worth making, I still haven’t figured out why he had to invent a new word to make it. He has further cemented me into my dim view that people who think their idea is so bold that prior art words are insufficient to express it are worthy only of jeering and making sport.
I looked up their website proevo.ch and found this on whois:
I looked up the nameholder and it’s just a publishing company http://www.casanova.ch/
But the name of the technical contact “Frei Ivo” sounds kind of like Pro Evo…
I wrote to Casanova Druck und Verlag AG asking for the history of the book and its author. If I get a reply I’ll post it here!
This German link has some info Joseph Haid und Tomot Om A partial translation says: