By the Book: Stories and Pictures

"Schoemperlen's inventive language and narrative structures encourage readers to be free 'from the prison of everyday thinking.'"—The New York Times Book Review

"Lovely, clever, [and] imaginative."—The Wall Street Journal

Once touted as compendiums of human knowledge, the encyclopedias and handbooks of bygone eras now read quaintly, if not comically—yet within their pages are often found phrases of uncanny evocative power. Scrupulously stitching such fragments togeth…