Heavy Reading

If, like me, you are the type that rips through every dentist’s-office periodical, every menu and wine list, every recent acquisition of the corner branch of the local library, every cereal box nutritional label, every bottom-of-the-screen news crawl, every best seller, and every fad magazine that’ll be out of publication within another month or two, then you might enjoy some heavy reading — some very heavy reading, indeed.

Just pocket your favorite spectacles and travel uptown to this single-volume library at Elm and Tenth (and Oak and Eleventh). You won’t need to bother with its title, for, you see, this single voluminous volume constitutes the entire library. You might say that it’s both fiction and non-fiction (as well as science fiction, and fantasy, and alternate reality). It is also part dictionary, part bible, part encyclopedia, part cookbook, part racing guide, part glossary, part thesaurus, part owner’s manual, part pronunciation guide, and part advice column. For this ponderous skyscraper of a tome is The Story of It All.  

Whether you are anxious to know exactly which tale the beguiling Scheherazade saved for her thousandth-and-first night with King Shahryar, or perhaps trying to determine the nearest metric equivalent to a 3/8” socket, this is your guide. Maybe you’d be entertained by the noir detective novels of Dashiell Hammett? The plays of Shakespeare? Films of Spielberg? Cycles of Harley? Donuts of Dunkin’?

No matter what you might be looking for, you are sure to find it in The Story of It All.

(I should know; I edited it!)