We report on $25$ families of projective Calabi-Yau threefolds that do not have a point of maximal unipotent monodromy in their moduli space. The construction is based on an analysis of certain pencils of octic arrangements that were found by C. Meyer. There are seven cases where the Picard-Fuchs operator is of order two and $18$ cases where it is of order four. The birational nature of the Picard-Fuchs operator can be used effectively to distinguish between families whose members have the same Hodge numbers.
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