b'The Joy of Old and Odd Books; A Letter from the Managing Editor; From Volume CLVIII, Number 2 of Speculative Grammarian, February 2010. \\u2014 As I was perusing my signed 1355 first edition copy of J\\xf6tunn Svart\\xe1lfar\\u2019s Teach Yourself Gothic in Six Score Minutes per Fortnight, I was struck by the stark disparity between my personal and professional collections of books, as compared to the utter disregard for the written word displayed by the general American populace. Old books and odd books, musty treatises and crumbling tomes, flights of fancy and important, eternal ideas fill the bookshelves of my library and inhabit the chambers of my mind. In contrast, the average person\\u2014barely deserving of the appellation homo sapiens\\u2014cover what shelves they have with worthless gewgaws while their minds echo hollowly with a vapid emptiness. (Read by Trey Jones.)'