The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The fifth theory of the Intended Purpose (the Fifth Theory) is not yet a theory, it’s still more of a conjecture, but it has a lot of things going for it and everyone’s really pulling for the Fifth Theory and thinks it’s well on its way to theory-hood.

3.2.1             Unsubstantiated assertion (status: in dispute)

Whatever the Intended Purpose may be, this much is clear: the book is a system, method, and space for a comprehensive categorization of all objects, categories of objects, categories of categories of objects, etc.

4 What there is not

5 Mode of propagation

5.1        How the book changes hands

On the left-facing inside cover of The Framing Book, we find the word “DEDICATED,” and underneath, two lines labeled

“From: ________________ ”

and

“To: __________________ ”.

5.2       Each possessor of the book

attempts to impose his numbered ordering of the world by adding categories.

5.3       At some point whether out of frustration or a sense of completion, or a desire to impose such system on others,

a possessor will pass the book on to another user, by excising his or her name from the To line, placing the name in the From line, and then writing in the name of the next possessor of the book in the To line. The excision should be performed with the same instrument used to cut new pages.

6 As you may have realized

6.1       What this means is

The Book of Categories contains what is, in essence, its own chain of title. It is a system of world-ordering, which has, encoded into itself, a history of its own revision and is, in that sense, the opposite of a palimpsest. Nothing is ever overwritten in The Book of Categories, only interspersed, interlineated, or, to be more precise, inter-paginated.

7 Why

7.1      Why

would someone ever give this book away?

8 A man

8.1Looking for what was there

8.1.1Trying to name it

8.1.1.1    Naming being one way

to locate something not quite lost, and not quite found

8.1.1.1.1    A name also seeming

to be a necessary AND sufficient condition to possession of an idea, a name being a kind of idea-cage.

9 Something else you need to realize about the book

9.1       Is that

The sheer number of pages in the book is such that ordinary human fingers cannot turn the pages in a reliably repeatable fashion. Simply breathing in the same room as the book will cause the book’s pages to flail about wildly. Even the Brownian motion of particles has been known to move several hundred pages at a time.

9.2      In fact, if you ever lose your place in the book,

it is unlikely that you will ever be able to return to the same page again in your lifetime

[INSERTED]

6.1.1   One reason

why someone would give this book away: at some point, whether out of frustration or a sense of completion, or a desire to impose such sys- tem on others, a possessor will pass the book on to another user, by

excising his or her name from the To line on the

[INSERTED]

5.2.1 Each possessor of the book [4]

The various possessors of the book can be traced, from which⁴

10 A man named Chang Hsueh-liang

has possessed the book seventy-three times. No other individual has owned it more than six times.

10.1      Little is known about Chang, a general in the Chinese army,

except that he is believed to have lost a child, a newborn daughter, in a freak accident while on a brief holiday with his family.

10.1.1           The incident

Onlookers who witnessed the incident say there were no words in their language to describe what occurred, only that “the water took her” and that although “nothing impossible happened,” it was, statistically speaking, a “once in a universe event.”

10.1.1.1   His daughter

was five weeks old when she died. For reasons unknown, she had yet to be named.

10.2      It is unclear whether Chang

was repeatedly seeking out the book, or it kept finding its way back to him.

10.3      A medal of some sort, and two insects

are believed to have been placed inside the book by Chang.

10.3.1             The general problem of categorization