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Dig Deeper
In its initial incarnation, The Book of Dirt was to be presented as a "found manuscript". The structure would take the form of Talmudic pages, with a central narrative and surrounding commentaries. I'll be posting a sample page soon, but in the meantime, here's the original prologue. It's kind of embarrassing and overdone in parts, and it's pretty long, but hey, it's also kind of fun. So here goes:
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER ON THE SECOND EDITION OF PRESSER’S “THE BOOK OF DIRT”
I first discovered The Book of Dirt while on holiday in the Czech Republic. A colleague had given me a list of her favourite Prague bookstores, literary oases far removed from the throng of tourists that infest the more popular historical sites, and told me that I was to visit any one of them whenever I needed an escape. There are many things to love about these stores, she said, not the least of which is the vast selection of novels by Czech authors that are published by small independent houses and that never find their way to the outside world. She then joked about the tax deductibility of the trip should I happen to acquire one of...