Not the Illuminati; swashbuckling romance

In yesterday's post "Crazy sync: Bardelys the Magnificent," I recount how I had a title randomly selected from a catalog of over 60,000 books and was given Sabatini's Bardelys the Magnificent, and then the next day ran into the name Bardelys the Magnificent again in the comments to a tongue-in-cheek post about the Illuminati. I joked that the sync fairies were trying to tell me to join the Illuminati.

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After posting that last night, I listened to part of an interview with Gary Lachman on The Higherside Chats. Lachman told of a precognitive dream he had had which foretold details of the 1994 film The Shadow. Lachman mentioned in passing that a 45 was the Shadow's trademark weapon, and for some unaccountable reason when he said that number, it jumped out at me and seemed very significant. It was as if the word "FORTY-FIVE" had been shouted at ten times the volume of the rest of the conversation (subjectively, I mean; it's not as if I actually had an auditory hallucination to that effect). Afterwards, of all the things that had been discussed on the podcast, what stood out in my memory was that he had said the number 45.

This morning, curious about last night's sync, I ran a Google image search for bardelys the magnificent, and my eyes were drawn to the third and fourth results:

Later in the morning, I met with an adult English student. He has a grammar exercise book that he works on at home, and then when we meet I check his answers and explain whatever needs to be explained. This illustration from the book caught my eye:

The two movie posters in the illustration bear an obvious resemblance to the two Bardelys pictures that had caught my eye earlier. On the left, a man with a plumed hat, baldric, and sword; on the right, a man and a woman holding each other.

And the illustration is from Unit 45 of the grammar book. (We typically go through four or five units each time.)

So, I think I'm going to have to read Bardelys the Magnificent.

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Update: Holy shit. So I just published these two posts about Bardelys the Magnificent syncs and, sandwiched between them, an unrelated sync post called "Visualize the devil and he doth appear" -- the title being an adaptation of the proverb "Speak of the devil . . . ."

I just now went to Gutenberg, downloaded Bardelys the Magnificent -- a title so obscure that I am only the 38th person in history to have done so -- and opened it. The first chapter is titled "The Wager" (cf. my tag "The highway is for gamblers"), and the first four words of the novel are: "Speak of the devil."

This is a spooky level of sync even by my rather jaded standards.