Have you
ever been on a quest?
When I was
in college my friends and I spent a weekend at the coast. We played games, did
various touristy things, and had a good time (no, there wasn’t that much
alcohol involved). We stopped in a little used bookstore in a small coastal
town. It was cluttered with mismatched bookshelves and crates or boxes where
there were no bookshelves. If there was any organization to it, the system was
known only to the owner. That old used book smell permeated everything, a sweet
musty odor that coated the back of your sinuses. In other words, it was a great
bookstore. One to meander through the stacks of detritus where you might find a
hidden gem. In the midst of our search, one of us found something and started
to laugh. We all joined round. The object at hand was a book entitled The Platypus
of Doom by Arthur B. Cover. But wait; there’s more! The back cover promised
more dangerous creatures inside the book: The Armadillo of Destruction, the
Aardvark of Despair, and The Clam of Catastrophe. We had a good laugh, and then
put the book back on the self. We poked around the bookstore for a bit and then
left. Occasionally on the rest of the trip and then on the way home someone
would bring up the Platypus of Doom. By the time we got back home a
couple of hours from that small town, we realized that we really should have
bought the book. Now it would haunt us. What do you suppose was in that book?
Would it be wonderfully funny, or just a cheap piece of schlock?
From time to
time the book would come up again in our conversations, and I resolved the next
time I was in that little coastal town, I would get the book and satisfy our
curiosity. It was probably a year before I was back in that bookstore, but the
book was gone. We had determined by now that the book was out of print, so the
only place to find it would be a used bookstore (This was before Amazon.com, or
eBay. It was pretty much before the internet was even a thing). Eventually
curiosity turned into a minor obsession. We all looked for the book. We went
our separate ways, two to different colleges, and one into the Marines. We
spread out to different cities and different states, but wherever we went, we
looked for the book. It was nowhere to be found. I even went to Powell’s City
of Books in Portland, to no avail. Eventually I married, and enticed my wife
into the quest. I would occasionally hear from my other two friends, but no one
had any luck. It was as if the book had been a figment of our imagination.
The quest
had taken on somewhat mythic proportions when one day, at least ten years
later, my wife and I were in Portland and we decided to try Powell’s again.
There she found it! In fact, she found two copies. What an amazing wife I have!
I immediately took them to the cashier as if I was afraid that if I didn’t buy
them that instant, they would disappear. I rambled about our quest to the
cashier. She probably smiled politely as she took care of the rather eccentric
customer who was so excited about this schlocky-looking paperback.
As soon as
we got home, I read the book. As you might expect, the excitement of the hunt
lies in the chase, not the capture. The book itself was not bad, a quirky funny
little science fiction collection of four novellas or novelettes that unwittingly
stumble us though the meaning of existence. And the platypus on the cover is
wearing a bow tie! What more could you want? Not bad at all really, but as I
said, the thrill was in the chase. I never quite found a quest that matched up
to that one.
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