overnight to many distant cities: Borges on the Thriller

(((Borges pastiche. Okay, that's pretty pastiche-y. It almost reads like it was machine-generated.)))

Link: overnight to many distant cities: Borges on the Thriller.

In that dim callejon sin salida near the Prado which houses the bookshop of the blind Abu al-Uqbari, I came across a book which bore the stamp of the library of the Athenaeum Club in London, of which Dickens, Darwin, Kipling, Thackeray and Scott were members. No one of them ever dared write of the reason why the clock on its stairwell should bear, twice, the numeral seven, while the number eight is absent from the dial, though the book of another member, Sheikh Abdullah’s Harun Al-Rashid (London, 1933), presents a possibility suggestive at least to the sect of the Acolytes of Perdix (alectoris philbyi was named for him, rather than his more notorious son).

The pale tan binding in octavo minor and its slender spine, faintly edged with gold which had rubbed away over the years, gave little hint that there was anything remarkable about this volume...