{"product_id":"the-conical-conspiracy-hubbard-sellers-9798188656867","title":"The Conical Conspiracy: A Very Pointed History","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Conical Conspiracy is a work of straight-faced comic scholarship: a complete secret history of the traffic cone, written by a man who has spent nine years in municipal archives and would like a word with you about lane closures.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe thesis is simple. Presidents can be subpoenaed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePopes have stood trial. But no human being in recorded history has ever demanded that a traffic cone justify itself - and an object with a one hundred percent compliance rate and no enforcement mechanism is not safety equipment. It is something else.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book traces that something else across two and a half centuries. It begins in a Bavarian tavern in 1776, where a cash-strapped Adam Weishaupt concludes that fear does not scale and a junior initiate proposes inverting the pyramid. It moves through a hundred and sixty-two years of humiliating failure - a ninety-four-pound oak prototype in Prague, a marble catastrophe that starts a riot in Vienna, six hundred papier-mâché units dissolving into orange porridge across Lyon. It arrives in a back room above a Trenton hardware store in 1938, where five men in bowler hats commission a color engineered to be impossible to like, and settle on a working man's name for the paperwork. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFrom there: the geometry of why it had to be a cone, the four-step neurological bypass that happens behind your eyes in half a second, and the Zone of Executive Immunity - three cones, one vest, any rectangular object, and a slice of public road becomes sovereign territory.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen Times Square, June 1994, where a logistics middle-manager named Gary lays four hundred cones around three city blocks, waits all day to be arrested, and is instead told by a stranger in a Buick to shut up and respect the cones.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt ends somewhere unexpected: with the uncomfortable possibility that the whole apparatus is not mind control at all, but the most underrated act of collective trust our species has ever managed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Hubbard Sellers\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798188656867\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/23\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 40\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.19lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.10d","brand":"Hubbard Sellers","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50665958473983,"sku":"9798188656867","price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/the-conical-conspiracy-hubbard-sellers-9798188656867","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}