Who, pray tell, is Lord Whimsy? Glad you asked.

Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy — to make use of the honorific in its entirety — is a jack-a-pudding, a grammaticaster, a chutney-bottomed ninnyroger. Or, to put it plainly: He’s a dandy. And, to top it all off, he’s a hoot.

For some time, Lord Whimsy regaled readers of the Philadelphia Independent, a bimonthly publication addressing “urban particulars” with witticisms on all manners of the dilettante lifestyle. When the paper folded, in 2004, Lord Whimsy took to the Web, drawing attention from all quarters of the globe. Chomping at the bit to reach a wider public, Lord Whimsy, in the quiet pulchritude of his home in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, crafted The Affected Provincial’s Companion: Volume One (Bloomsbury, $14.95). A gorgeously bound volume that nestles ever so pleasantly in the hands, the journal is an eye-pleasing, smile-rousing treatise that describes everything from the language of laces to the beauty of raising Luna moths, with nearly every epistle augmented by his own graphic silhouettes. Named one the best books of the year by The Financial Times (yes, that would be the London publication), this Companion is a bit of fresh air at a time when the world can feel all too stale. Or at least look poorly clad.

In town late last year to discuss the book, and the bon-bons and bon mots contained within, Lord Whimsy sat down to discuss a life of foppery. Dressed impeccably in wools and silks, with his mustache handle-barred just so, he held forth on collecting butterflies, getting his ass kicked, and a possible worldview that might overthrow the oligarchs.

Ladies and gentlemen (and all others on the gender spectrum), meet Lord Whimsy.

Real Change: How do you prefer to be addressed? Whimsy? Lord?

Lord Whimsy: Oh, just Whimsy does the job. The “Lord” thing is just for fun, to let people know there’s an invitation to play.

RC: So, let’s talk about play, of the sort that’s in your book.

Whimsy: The book can be taken piecemeal: It can be read sequentially or you should just be able to drop down in the middle of it, have some good times for about five minutes, then go and have a Danish. I was planning to make something like Poor Richard’s Almanac, then take Oscar Wilde and put them together. It’s an organic sort of sensibility: Follow your nose, see where it leads you. To me, it seems a very modern way of going about the world.

RC: How so?

Whimsy: Most people have three or four careers during their lifetimes now. I think we’re all dabblers. We’re all dilettantes. We have to be, in order to get by in this world. We have to integrate and synthesize and see the connections between things, and not focus so much on the things themselves, but how they relate to each other.

RC: Not only do you synthesize ideas and thoughts, but you bring in a lot of graphics.

Whimsy: That comes from 15 years in graphic design. My wife and I have a design studio out of our house. So this started out as a playful sort of exercise, one of my little projects, and it just started gaining momentum and bringing in other influences — Tristram Shandy and other 19th-Century literature, modernist poetry like e.e. cummings — until, after a while, the boundaries started dissolving. But I also wanted something that kind of alluded to the organic. So it was just a germ that became something larger and larger.

RC: How long did it take for the germ to grow?

Whimsy: Guess my whole life basically, because I used to collect butterflies when I was a kid and go bird watching. I’ve always been more of a naturalist and always had that side that wanted to live the life of a country gent. I remember being 12 years old, sitting with a book on heraldry, watching Solid Gold on television, wearing slippers.

RC: You were a little kid collecting butterflies?

Whimsy: And I caught a lot of hell for that, because I’m the small nerdy kid. I got eaten alive. But it was necessary.

RC: Why do you say that?

Whimsy: I needed to go through that in order to know what I didn’t want to be like. I didn’t want to be like the people that were tormenting me, the bitter person that got a charge out of making other people feel small or weak. I wanted to be the opposite of that. And this book is about that. It comes from a generous place: You can be as beautiful as you want to be, too; you can be a first-rate version of yourself. Maybe that’s a little bit too ambitious, but I’ve never written a book before, so I don’t know what the rules are, so I’m sure to break them. I’m always getting it wrong. And that’s the other thing: This book, in a lot of ways, it fails on some level. Art is about failure. People forget that. If it was perfectly formulated, and it really hit the mark on all levels, it wouldn’t be that interesting, now would it?

RC: Do you think there is a great pressure about getting things right in society?

LW: I think people tend to be linear minded. And I’m not blaming them for feeling that way because most people have to be that way. The grade on the highway has to be a certain angle so trucks don’t fly off it, and surgeons got to know their job. Learning how to sustain yourself and how to sustain things about us: That’s one path of life. But then, there’s the other half of life where you’re allowed to get it wrong. I hope I can maybe inspire people to become as beautiful as they’d like to be. Not like a warm fuzzy or something like that, but just challenge them, say, “Hey, this can be yours, if you’re up to it.”

RC: How did you come into graphic design?

Whimsy: Well, that was the one thing that I knew I could make a living out of, and be creative. My father was an elementary school teacher and he worked nights at the liquor store, and my mother worked at the same liquor store as a secretary. So [as a kid] I’d do homework under the counters, down there reading books while the town drunks came in and got their booze.

But I didn’t know what graphic design was until I went to college. I thought I was going to become a marine biologist, but I realized that chemistry was not going to be my forte. So I would do what an artist does, by nature: I would look at something, a process or an object, and I would start drawing metaphors from it. So, it was only natural that eventually I would work up the courage to go into the art department and find a plan. And that was the crack in the door. So I followed. Once you’re in that [design] world, you can start drawing resources and linking up with people. The crucial thing is to make those connections.

RC: You’re talking about connections in thought, or connections with people?

Whimsy: Both. Sometimes people are the thoughts. They’re so laden with artifice that you never really get to know them. Not in a bad way, but someone who could keep the world at arm’s length.

RC: Do you feel that you are laden with artifice?

Whimsy: I think we all are, to some degree. I think the most disingenuous thing in the world is to put on this [voice deepens] “mantle of authenticity.” Liberace probably had more street cred than Bob Dylan ever will, because he was up front. He was like, “Hey, I like glitz, I like showbiz.” It was camp, of course, but it was coming from a place that was sincere. You can be inauthentic, you can be a phony, but you can be a sincere phony. There’s something more comforting about that than there is about someone saying, “Well, I’m a very deep person.” In other words: Someone being deeply superficial is much preferable than someone being superficially deep.

RC: So this is a complete non sequitur—

Whimsy: That’s fine. I’m a walking non sequitur.

RC: —but listening to you talk about that suddenly made me think about politics.

Whimsy: Oh. Politics. [Pause.] You know, I’ve been to a lot of parts of the world, like South Africa. Durban was like you took Miami and left it alone for 10 years: People dying out in the open, gangs out on the corner with rusty knives waiting for tourists like me to come out and shake him down. It was a very scary and dangerous thing, and you can see where the disparity between the rich and poor is a toxic element in a society. It just poisons the world. I think that we should all endeavor to do as good as we possibly can. It’s probably a very middle-class, conceited thing to say, and I’ll own up to that. But I think that without a middle class, you don’t really have a democracy and you don’t have an educated electorate either. I think the middle class takes a lot of crap from pundits. I would rather leave things in the hands of some guy who knows how to do a job, and how to apply an idea, rather than with some idle, rich bugger that really doesn’t have the struggle in his sights. I don’t think we should leave the big decisions to the oligarchs.

I think my aesthetics probably colors my thinking as far as politics goes, but I like a horizontal relationship, not a vertical relationship based on hierarchies. We should be able to have a more fluid political model, and so far, it seems the democratic model seems to allow for that more than any other model. I’m not a big fan of big, monolithic ideas. Big ideas get people killed. It’s a very 20th century way of looking at things. We’re about to go into an organic age, we’re going to start thinking in more fluid terms in the future, in terms of integrating things. It’s going to take an awful lot of heart and an awful lot of mind, in order for people to meet that challenge. The weight has to be evenly distributed throughout the society. [Pause.] I don’t know if that makes any sense.

RC: It does make sense. But here’s a question for you: How do we nurture the horizontal systems and present them as an alternative to the vertical systems?

Whimsy: If I knew that, I’d be on Charlie Rose right now. That’s for minds greater than my own. But I can forward a couple of suggestions and see where they go.

RC: Please.

Whimsy: It seems to me, instead of coming from top down, each one of us has to hold each other responsible for what we do. It’s kind of like: Instead of the tyranny of one oligarch, we’ve got the tyranny of 3,000 neighbors. And there is a danger in that. It’s going to have to be a system that can improvise. That takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of responsibility and it takes a lot of oversight and it takes a lot of watching each other to do that. It’s going to be exhausting. But you know what? It’s going to keep a lot of people busy, instead of worrying whether or not I’m marrying another man. Instead they’ll be worrying about how they’re going to get the trains running on time. And that’s what governance is for: not to tell me how to run my life, but tell my how the infrastructure works. Just keep things working around us.

And that’s where the idea of play comes in, because there’s an improvisation that goes on with play: Whenever we play we’re trying out new realities, aren’t we? It’s the same thing with art: we’re trying out new realities, we’re putting tendrils out there into the universe to see what happens to them. That’s important for a culture. When a culture stops playing, it starts dying.