We were driving across the country and Ohio was a wasteland. We knew no one in Ohio except for T_____. He was older, more settled, free of a regular shower schedule, not without our adoration. It secretly pleased us that he so incongruously lived there and we would have to stay with him and study his kung fu as he railed against the static life of Midland, Ohio.

There is simply nothing to do in Midland, T_____ told us. Save one.

T_____ was the keeper of Midland's knowledge, the town librarian. He had the keys and he said the place had character and it was the only bar in town worth going to. We happily offered him the hard cider we had stolen from an orchard in the upstate New York just that morning and clustered behind him as he addressed us from the stairs leading to the basement, where the real collection was. T_____ handed us all white masks with purple elastic bands.

Put these on, he told us. The books have been down there for so long, have become so rich with themselves, that they have spread into the air, filling it as completely as the shelves.

So, as we drank through a straw slipped under our masks, we got the tour. Incunabula and rarities. Ancient things printed on cotton and skin, velum and pulp. T_____'s enthusiasm was easy to catch, even with the masks on our faces, and we wandered the shelves, our eyes getting wide with alcohol and wonder. Then he showed us the real commodities, the bizarre ones, the ones that would pique an artist's curiosity as well as a scholar's.

Chief among them, the document we came to call The Collected Works. He had found it tucked inside an old cyclopedia, in amongst the P's. It was the product, he told us, of his predecessor's predecessor, one of the only pieces in the basement to come from the mind of one of the Midland librarians themselves.

The Collected Works were just four folios, the tops cut to make an unbound, soft book. No margins, no forward, no contents, no context to speak of. Just this curator's thoughts as he compiled the library's collection and watched the world change around him.

The Collected Works, we came to realize, were it. They were firing on all cylinders, they were wry, they were fast, they were true, they were right. They were surprisingly easy to steal.

We had The Collected Works with us across the country. We took turns driving, reading out loud, and sitting, open-mouthed at the salience of it all. We read and re-read, we memorized and quoted and discussed. We had The Collected Works of Lester Buckets, who, as he collected the written wisdom of his country and his age, had taken the time -- hours, weeks, or years we have no way of knowing -- but he had taken the time to write down how it all made sense to him. And it made sense to us.