Reader,

     What you’re about to read might change your life forever, just like it changed mine.

     I first heard about the exploits of Sir Tomeas Booksworth while a professor at Cambridge University. The details of his daring pursuits were so unbelievably cool they left me reeling like someone had thrown a book at me (one of the experiences you typically only have when you’re either a professor or a convicted criminal. The two professions have more in common than you’d think, weirdly enough, but that’s something we can talk about some other time). A book full of questions. How in the name of King George III’s cheetah, Miss Jenny, had he managed to defeat all of those bad guys in books? How had he traveled into books in the first place? How could I grow sideburns like his? I had to know!

     That’s why I left Cambridge and joined the group Sir Booksworth works for, which is called the Society of Story Exploration and Conservation. It wasn’t because of the fancy biscuits they serve you at your induction ceremony that are all frosted to look like Queen Victoria’s face, or the awesome helmets all members get, or the chance you have to pat the head of the Society’s tortoise mascot, Jeffery, at Tuesday meetings. Most people want all that, for obvious reasons, but not me. I just wanted some answers. 

     Some of those answers, I got. Others, not so much. Like the sideburn thing. I’m still figuring that out.

     But I did learn how Sir Booksworth travels into books! 

     Let me tell you, it’s wild. 

     Basically, this lady named Eugenia Loughty invented a top-secret machine called The Vortext that can teleport you into stories. To use it, you just pop a book into a slot, press a few buttons, pull a lever, and zap! You’re chumming around with Winnie the Pooh (do NOT chum around with Winnie the Pooh, though, you’ve got to watch that guy, especially if you’ve got biscuits. He’s a fiend for those). The Society uses it to travel into books, recover items in there we call ‘artifacts’, and take those items to the Explorium, where they’re protected from the nasty people who want to take them. 

Nasty people like the Society’s nemesis, Dr. Agonus Valefar. 

From what I’ve heard, Dr. Valefar was an author who decided that writing was not about telling stories, but flooding the world with tons of mediocre books to sell for money. He churned out a bunch of trashy novels he bundled into a series called Stick Figures: Nude, Violent, and On Drugs and started hawking them to everyone. 

     I’ve read a copy of one of these books and it was so, so bad. Like, rip-my-eyes-out-and-feed-them-to-a-hippopotamus bad. Reading his garbage, I felt actual physical pain. 

Everyone else did, too, which is why it’s so hard to find Stick Figures: Nude, Violent, and On Drugs anywhere these days (thank goodness). The series was only available for a week and a half before reviews started coming in, reviews so scathing that Valefar’s publisher closed down out of embarrassment. People hosted giant bonfire parties where they burned all copies they could find, down to the last page. I’m pretty sure the one I read (a copy of #67, Pencil-Whipped by the Polygonal Prince) is the only one in existence now. 

     Dr. Valefar lost his mind. Like, his train was already cruising for crazy town, but after all that happened, he really went off the rails. Screaming in public. Purchasing Dickens collections and throwing them into the Thames. Blowing up his editor’s house. 

     He went to jail for that one. Ten years, the authorities said. Two for destruction of property. Eight for crimes against literature. 

     He broke out. The bobbies chased him to Society headquarters. The last they saw of him, he was pulling the lever on the Vortext and vanishing into a copy of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. 

Dr. Valefar now rampages amok in the world of literature, jumping from book to book, wreaking his vengeance by destroying all stories onto which he can possibly lay his filthy hands. He’s created a malicious assistant, the Automatic Illiterator, to help him steal artifacts before we can pull them out of his iconoclastic reach. 

     This is of utmost importance. The artifacts he hunts— items like Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur, the wand of Merlin, the bow of Robin Hood, the magic lamp of Aladdin, and others— contain the very power of the stories they are associated with. When we protect them, we protect humanity’s ability to remember stories, to create them, and to be inspired by the stories it hears from others. We protect imagination itself.

     Whatever Valefar gets, he destroys. He must be stopped. The future of who we are as a species depends on it. 

     That is where you come in.

      If learning of Booksworth’s feats in this book inspires you as it did me, join us in our crusade to protect imagination against Valefar, the Automatic Illiterator, and their malicious colleagues. The Society is always in need of fearless new recruits to safeguard the ethereal magic of stories alongside us. 

     You may not have the Vortext, but you may still carry on the fight. Read stories, create them, hear them, remember them. 

     For it is stories that tell us who we ought to be. What we should strive to become. They shape our deepest selves, they chart our paths through lands unknown. 

Stories teach us to never sleep, but dream.

     I won't keep you waiting any longer. Turn the page and start a journey through the amazing successes of our remarkable hero, Tomeas Booksworth. 

     Legimus. Fingemabus. Vicimus.

 

Yours, 

Dr. Rutherford Gripley

Professor Emeritus of Literature, Cambridge University

Senior Tabularius for the Society of Story Exploration and Conservation

Undersecretary for the Royal Ornithological Society of London