José Mindlin
José Mindlin was a Brazilian lawyer, businessperson and bibliophile, born to Ukrainian Jewish parents. He was the owner of the largest private library in Latin America, with more than 38,000 titles.
Diana Vreeland
Diana Vreeland was a fashion editor with an incredible personality.
Theodore Judd Serios
Theodore Judd Serios was a Chicago bellhop, who became known in the 1960s by producing "thoughtographs" on Polaroid film. He claimed these were produced using psychic powers.
André Malraux
André Malraux was a French author, adventurer and statesman.
Samuel Steward
Samuel Steward was a university professor, writer, tattoo artist, and pornographer.
Harold L. Humes
Harold L. Humes was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two novels in the late 1950s, and a gregarious fixture of the cultural scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a champion talker, activist, filmmaker, architect, and contemporary Don Quixote. In 1966, in London, he took large amounts of LSD, which was given to him by Timothy Leary, and he became paranoid and sometimes delusional. After this, he no longer published any writing. When he returned to the US in 1969, he reinvented himself as a "guru on campus", a self-appointed visiting professor, and spent the next 20-odd years living on or near-campus at Columbia, Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard, dependent on both his family, and on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness.
King Ludwig II
King Ludwig II is best known as an eccentric whose legacy is intertwined with the history of art and architecture, as he commissioned the construction of several extravagant fantasy castles (the most famous being Neuschwanstein) and was a devoted patron of the composer Richard Wagner.
Leo Stoller
Leo D. Stoller is an American self-styled intellectual property entrepreneur based in suburban Chicago, Illinois. Stoller controversially claimed rights to a large inventory of famous trademarks infringement action and engaged in the assertive enforcement of those alleged trademark rights, threatening against people and companies who attempt to use similar marks.
Charles Howard Hinton
Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for his work on methods of visualizing the geometry of higher dimensions. He was also one of the many abstruse thinkers who circulated in Jorge Luis Borges's pantheon of writers.
Lady Godiva
Lady Godiva was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry, in England, in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants. The name "Peeping Tom" for a voyeur originates from later versions of this legend in which a man named Tom had watched her ride and was struck blind or dead.