  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.
