I Found This Book Nowhere

and the book is saying

so

are

you

This is the strangest book I own; the cover is a color mixed somewhere between navy and purple and claimed by neither. There is a bright white chair in the middle surrounded by a circle. At twelve evenly space points along the circle eleven lines radiate out from each point, creating an intricate network of white lines cross-hatching the circle. In truth, there are no lines or chair; the images are created by negative space on the cover. Therefore, it is only an impression of a chair. But your eyes slide off this distinction and see, yes, a chair. A simple wooden chair within an abstract, geometrical pattern. At the cardinal edges is the word “Remember,” four times. There are words around the circle; but we'll read them later. All in all, it has the look of an occult tract written in Frank Miller's Sin City.

The title? Well, here you have to indulge in some conjecture. The book arrives in my hands working at the library, a tiny part of a large donation from a retiring professor. My task to methodically determine what books the library already holds, and whether the donation is an earlier or later edition.

This is a problem child.

No, the library has no copy. But searching through the WorldCat database, collecting millions of books catalogued throughout the international network, I could uncover three titles:

Be Here Now

Now Be Here

Remember Be Here Now

Librarians all over the world are confounded by this tome. At least I'm not alone. Amused and wondering just how to catalogue this thing, and generally intrigued by the–

Wait, let me tell you more about the pages. And why it's so hard to classify. Forget the cover; no one who handles books, stacking and shelving and searching and archiving, is fooled by the outside. The secret history of a book is written on the inside, in the title page. A blank page, and then a few more pages gives you all the legal information. The real author, the full title, the copyright year, the publisher, the printing. All the hardcore nerdy stuff a booklover wants to really know; where the ancestry of the ink lies. And what the technician needs to handle the blizzard of texts storming in.

Only this title page is little different. It tells me,

“Yes, I am printed in 1971. By the way, did you know that's the Year of the Earth Monkey? Also, this is made in love for love. Any portion of this may be reprinted to ring the bell of the dharma, but only with prior written permission of the Lama Foundation.”

More or less. As of a sixth printing, there were 186,000 copies of the book floating about. Not too shabby for a book with no fixed title. Yeah, after all that, no title on the copyright page. There is no title page, really. There is a page devoted to telling you how the money (in 1971 costing $3.33) paid for the book is distributed, with the admission

“We don't fully understand the relationship between the energy formed here and the green energy that flows through us.”

Amen, brother. So I walk in to the supervisor, because the book amuses me and perplexes me all the same.

“Hey chief, how do I handle this. It has something like three names.”

She takes it and turns it over, flipping through it. The pages are yellowed with age just a bit, and the cover has tears and dog-ear stress. She laughs at some of the illustrations and the general tone of the writing. “Well, this hasn't actually been catalogued by anyone yet. It doesn't exist. What do you want to do with it?”

“Man, it would be awesome if I had a book like that.” I'm wistful but joking.

She's got her head bent and looking over her glasses with a smile.

“Seriously?”

She keeps looking.

“I need you to at least say okay.”

“See,” she says, “It's in pretty bad condition, it lacks solid information, there's already other copies held by other libraries. We'll probably just have to give it away or recycle it anyway.” The hard truth is the library can't store infinite books. So we nod, and the book disappears into my bag before I settle in to research the rest of the stuff on the cart.

This is perhaps my favorite part. The author is sitting down with a relative who believes he's Jesus and is locked up for doing one crazy thing after another, stealing and the like. And he looks at the author, funky beard and a dress and the whole hippie shebang, and cannot understand why Jesus is locked up and the author's free. The hippie explains:

Sure * Because as far as I'm concerned we're all God * That's the difference * If you really think another guy is God he doesn't lock you up ***

*Funny about that *

And all the *'s are tiny, haloed Christs.

It's a hippie bible. Now, I've got a lot of books on my shelf. Three different English bibles. Even a Mormon bible, just 'cuz. The Tao Te Ching, the Analects, the Apocrypha and stuff on Kabbalah; I could use a good Qur'an. Books on all kinds of mythology. Every continent covered, except Antarctica, but if you know a good penguin mythology collection, send it on by. Fiction, mostly fantasy and science fiction but not all. Science and poetry and history and the Complete Works of Shakespeare and E.A. Poe. Beowulf and Grendel. But this book is the weirdest of the lot.

I put it on the shelf and all the books shimmy to Parliament: We got the funk UNGH! Give us the funk! You see, what I'm trying to tell you is the title. Remember the words around the circle I didn't tell you? Be and Here and Now chase each other around the circle in repetition, but the spaces change, and at one point they merge for BE NOWHERE. The spine has both Be Here Now and Now Be Here, flipped, mirrored. I'm trying to tell you

the

title

is