The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The Book of Categories Handled, Damaged, Partially Repaired, Damaged Again, and Then Documented by Charles Yu

0 What there is

1 Proper name

The full name for The Book of Categories[1] is as follows:

THE BOOK OF CATEGORIES

(A CATALOG OF CATALOGS

(BEING ITSELF A VOLUME ENCLOSING

A CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE

(SUCH STRUCTURE BEING

COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS AN

(IDEA)-CAGE)))

2 Nature of

2.1 Basic properties of

The Book of Categories is composed of two books, one placed inside the other.

The outer book (formally known as The Outer Book) is a kind of frame wrapped around the inner book, which is known as, uh, The Inner Book.

2.1.1 Paper

The Inner Book’s pages are made of a highly unusual type of paper, which is made of a substance known as (A)CTE, so-called because of its (apocrypha)-chemical-thermo-ephemeral properties, the underlying chemistry of which is not well understood, but the practical significance of which is a peculiar characteristic: with the proper instrument, (A)CTE can be sliced and re-sliced again, page-wise, an indefinite number of times.

2.1.1.1 Method for creation of new pages

Each cut must be swift and precise, and the angle must be metaphysically exact, but if the operation is performed correctly, there is no known lower bound to the possible thinness of a single sheet of (A)CTE paper.

A photograph of pages from The Book of Categories, origin unknown.

2.1.1.1.1 Page count

To wit, as of the time of this writing, despite having total thickness (in a closed position) of just over two inches, The Book of Categories contains no less than 3,739,164 pages.[2]

3 Intended Purpose

3.1 Conjecture

This property of repeated divisibility is believed to be necessary for The Book of Categories to function in its intended purpose (the Intended Purpose).[3]

3.2 Theories regarding Intended Purpose

There are four major theories on what the Intended Purpose is. The first three are unknown. The fourth theory is known but is wrong.

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

Although it is worth noting that the location of these objects is unstable, due to a phenomenon particular to The Book of Categories known as “wobbling,” which can result from stored conceptual potential energy escaping through the frame of The Inner Book and resonating with The Outer Book.

10.5 It is clear from certain sites in the book

that Chang remained obsessed with naming what had happened to his child.

10.5.1 Chang’s last entry

is a clump of (A)CTE paper consisting of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of blank pages, known as The Chang Region. On each page of The Chang Region of the book is written what appears to be an ancient form of a Chinese character. Scholars disagree as to the identity of the character.

11 Eventually, a possessor of the book comes to realize

how hard it is to find any given page, lost among the pages. Trying to find that slice, to cut through it on either side, before the page has been lost.

[INSERTED]

8.1.1.1.1.1 A name actually being

a memorial to the site where an idea once

rested, momentarily, before moving on.

8.1.1.1.1.1.1 If you listen carefully,

you can hear it in there, but when you look inside, the idea-cage is always empty, and in its place, the concrete, the particular, something formerly alive, now dead and smashed.

[1] Which itself is listed in The Book of Books of Categories, vol. III, p. 21573, row K, column FF.

[2] And counting.

[3] The Intended Purpose is unknown, so this is basically just a wild-assed guess.

[4] Lambshead himself has been the caretaker of the book on two separate occasions, each time receiving it from Bertrand Russell, and each time passing it to Alfred North Whitehead.