Mortimo Planno Mortimo Planno Mortimer Planner or Mortimo Planno as he has come to be known was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1920. In 1939 he came to believe that Haile Selassie I is the Living God. After adopting the Rastafari lifestyle, Planno moved to Trench Town and became one of the founding members of Kingston's first Rastafarian camp in the Dungle. From that time to the present, Planno has been one of the more characteristic adherents of Rastafari. Being intensely studious, an exceptional and eloquent orator, and harboring an abiding concern for the welfare of all Rastafari he is known and respected among many Rastafari brethren worldwide. In 1961, Planno was selected to be a member of the Jamaican delegation that traveled throughout Africa (Mission to Africa) to explore the possibilities of repatriation. On April 21, 1966, now known as Grounation Day (a Rastafari holy day), Planno was able becalm a wildly enthusiastic and zealous mass of 100,000 Rastafari and other believers eagerly waiting to catch a glimpse of Haile Selassie I on his historic visit to Jamaica. This feat allowed the Emperor to make a more placid but still hurried de-planing to a waiting limousine. During Selassie's three day stay in Jamaica, Planno was among the selected Rastafari Elders who met with His Imperial Majesty (H.I.M.). This latter fact and Planno's broad knowledge of and adherence to Rastafari beliefs and practices led Bob Marley, one or two years after H.I.M.'s visit, to seek Planno out and "reason" with him in Trench Town. Planno passed on his knowledge of Rastafarian principles, rites and customs to Marley who eventually became an outspoken and internationally celebrated musician and dedicated adherent of the religion. Today, Planno, as a respected Rastafari elder, resides in Porus, Jamaica and is currently a Folk Fellow (1997-1999) at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

Publisher Notes on The Earth Most Strangest Man: The Rastafarian In 1969, Professor Lambros Comitas asked Mortimo Planno to write a text on Rastafari teachings. One year later, when Comitas returned to Jamaica, Planno gave a handwritten manuscript to him with Comitas' promise that it would made into a monograph. In 1995, Comitas had the manuscript typeset and printed and then bound a single volume in leather with gold stamping. He hand-delivered the monograph to an ailing Mortimo Planno in Jamaica. Publishing Planno's work earlier would have been an expensive and difficult process because of the nature and content of the manuscript. For example, the text is variously colored in a number of hues including black, red, green, yellow, blue, light blue, orange, and brown. To faithfully reproduce the text colors would require using a four color printing process and since most of the pages are coded in this manner the costs for reproducing them were prohibitive. Editing the text and content also presented issues that mediated against publishing the work in the standard fashion. Standardizing the spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax of Planno's text following the canons of American or British English or ordering the headings and paragraphs to fit someone else's logical presentation would alter the meanings of Planno's text. We believe that the text should be interpreted directly by the reader rather than to have it filtered through an editor(s) who may have insufficient knowledge of Rastafari beliefs, rites, customs, and terms and Jamaican patois not to mention the author's views. It also has been suggested that two texts, the original and edited version, be placed side by side in one monograph. However, this would double the length of the work, increase its printing cost and perhaps provoke unnecessary controversies about facts and related interpretations. But with the aid of hypertext markup language and the world wide web these problems are simply overcome and Mortimo Planno's work, The Earth Most Strangest Man: The Rastafarian is made available for public reading. Planno hand-copied the complete manuscript from other writings previously done as well as those newly created into an 8 X 10 3/4 soft paper-covered notebook with 200 blue-lined pages that were numbered on the upper right hand corner of each page. In addition to the handwritten text the the original manuscript contains seven drawings and two charts all of which have been digitalized and included with the text. As mentioned above the text is colored in a variety of hues. An attempt was made to reproduce the manuscript as Planno originally had written it with a few exceptions: The text was right justified. Text that was centered or indented from the left margin and left justified (poems, lyrics, etc.) was centered without left alignment in the web version. Distance between headings and paragraphs were standardized. Background (paper) and text colors are approximations to those found in the original manuscript. Graphic images of the drawings and charts are placed in the order they appeared in the text.