![]() ![]() With some hurt feelings and miscommunication, the pilgrim begins to throw stones at the monk. An exhausted novice and a world-weary pilgrim cross paths in the post-nuclear war wastes of southern Utah. If I remember correctly, I had just completed Tom Clancy’s latest, and I was looking for something completely different.Īnd, completely different it proved to be just in the first two pages. After all, it cost only $.50, and I had been looking for some new fiction. Canticle? Leibowitz? 500,000? Purely out of curiosity-and perhaps on a bit of a honeymoon high-I purchased it. On the cover, the company presented a ghostly-looking monk with a destroyed urban landscape in the background. it stated, proclaiming at the bottom of the cover: “500,000 Copies in Print!” Giving the PR folks the benefit of the doubt, I translated this to well over a half-million sold and read. Someone must have misplaced it, I reasoned. Published by Bantam, it certainly didn’t appear to be science fiction. Someone had stacked this bruised treasure rather haphazardly in a pile of science fiction books. Whether Idahoans still possess a bibliophilic outlook on life, I don’t know. Amazingly enough, Idaho had a lot of bookstores then, and I remember perusing many of them during our ten days of post-wedding bliss. In the summer of 1998, while on my ten-day honeymoon in Idaho, I found a tattered red paperback book in a used bookstore. ![]()
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