Later happened to be Tuesday, November 12, 2019. I had gotten home from work early and didn't expect my wife for a few hours, so I decided to leaf through a few of my books. I don’t do this nearly as often as I would like, so when it does occur to me and I have the time to do it properly, I really enjoy the experience. Rosemary’s Baby was on my mind, but I started with my Dragon Rebound Firestarter because I just can’t get enough of those wooden boards. From there I moved to my lettered Misery because…well, why not? Handling and smelling that book is akin to a religious experience for me, so I spent some time with it. And when I was through, I picked up Rosemary’s Baby. My intention was to start with it and then cycle through all the Suntup numbered, but I never would have guessed how entertaining that cycle was going to be. I’m not sure where in the book I started, but when I got to the copyright page, I focused in on that
L and this time I
really saw it:
there’s a random L at the bottom of this copyright page. And that was when the other letters that had leached into my subconscious over the months coalesced and popped up to the surface.
Ho-ly shit. There’s a pattern here. If someone made a movie about this moment in my life, this would be where the director would cut in a close-up of my eyes dilating followed by a CGI scene of my heart speeding up crazily. I ‘remembered’ the other letters at that point, but not well enough to be sure of them. So I shakily put down Rosemary’s Baby and picked up Misery.
S on that page. Next book? Hill House…which at the time was upstairs in the spare room where I keep most of my collection. I raced upstairs, grabbed it, and brought it back down to my book cabinet.
I opened it up to the
O. Then I moved on to Horns and saw the 3rd letter.
SOLL, no doubt about a pattern. However, thinking chronologically, Misery wasn’t the first Suntup publication. The Eyes of the Dragon portfolio and accompanying Palladini book were the first! I double-timed it back upstairs and dug out my EotD and Horns portfolios and the Palladini book. Those copyright pages didn’t have anything notable on them, so I decided it must just be the books starting with Misery…which of course also meant that The Road probably had a letter too. At this point, I mulled over the idea of waiting to say anything until The Road arrived. As I contemplated, I began wondering what the letters meant, so I jumped on my computer and started trying to figure that out. I started with the idea the letters may be Roman numerals, but that didn’t appear to fit. Then I thought maybe a code, like
S = 19 because it’s the 19th letter in the alphabet,
O = 15, and so on, but that also didn’t pan out. So I moved on to English words that start with
SOLL. Not many. Basically, solleret was the only one, and it’s really a French word. Buuuut, a solleret is part of a suit of armor, which fits in with EotD, so back upstairs to the portfolios again! At this point my mad dashes up and down the stairs had become fairly comical because our 2 cats had decided that this must be some sort of game, so they were racing around either following me, fighting each other, or preceding me into my book room or back down to the living room. But it’s also where the ‘element of danger’ I mentioned came into play, because I almost took a serious digger down the stairs at one point when one of my cats jammed his way through my legs as I was descending. How anti-climactic and incredibly lame it would have been for me to take a fatal cat-related fall down the stairs while excitedly investigating my discovery, thus taking it to my stupid fucking grave.
plotting my demise
Still breathing, though, I went through the EotD portfolio and the Palladini book again looking for a suit of armor picture that might have a clue, but there were no sollerets to be found. So I started thinking about other meanings. I knew that anagrams were a part of the Rosemary’s Baby announcement, but without knowing how many letters there actually were, it seemed relatively pointless to pursue that thread, so I moved to other languages. Embarrassingly, I started with typing ‘what language do they speak in South Africa?’ into Google seeing as how Paul has roots there, but the answer was at least 35, with 10 being official languages, which wasn’t the smoking gun I was looking for. So what next? Latin seemed reasonable, seeing as how it’s the root of a bunch of other languages, so I started doing some searches and bingo,
SOL can mean sun in Latin, which is a word that is part of Suntup, so it couldn’t be coincidence.
SOLL wasn’t really a word on its own in Latin, so I decided it must be at least 2 words, the first
SOL, the second starting with
L. Some quick searching revealed the Latin phrase
SOL LUCET OMNIBUS, which means ‘the sun shines on everyone.’ That’s it! That must be it! What a cool phrase to slowly roll out with each new book released! And believe it or not, I didn’t even once consider the idea that this was some sort of contest. I figured it was just something cool that Paul was doing, and that people might discover it at some point and enjoy the discovery on their own. So I decided to wait and see if The Road contained a
U to confirm my suspicion. As the minutes ticked by, however, it became obvious that I wouldn't be able to wait because I was practically giving off electricity with how excited I was. But I also didn’t want to ruin the surprise for everyone else by posting it in the Suntup thread, so I decided to send Paul a private message. I figured he could tell me about it, but then save the experience of finding it for others by keeping it to myself. Surprisingly, he told me to post it in the Suntup thread. So I did just that and was delighted to find out about the Easter Egg contest! And that I had won something (
post #7459)! But…there was no misunderstanding the fact that my guess was wrong. If it had been right, I would have won, and there would be no point in referring to a
potential grand prize winner (
post #7481). So back to the drawing board.
Originally Posted by jeffingoff
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