This book, intended as a paean to books, is built upon the foundations of many other books. The list runs too long to include them all, but here are a few of the brightest lights. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and “Lucius the Ass” (an epitome possibly by Lucian of Samosata) retell the doofus-turns-into-a-donkey story with far more zest and skill than I do. The metaphor of Constantinople serving as a Noah’s ark for ancient texts comes from The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel. I discovered Zeno’s solution to Aethon’s riddle in Voyages to the Moon by Marjorie Hope Nicolson. Many of the details of Zeno’s experiences in Korea were found in Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War by Lewis H. Carlson, and I was introduced to early Renaissance book culture by Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve.

This novel owes its greatest debt to an eighteen-hundred-plus-year-old novel that no longer exists: The Wonders Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes. Only a few papyrus fragments of that text remain, but a ninth-century plot summary written by the Byzantine patriarch Photios suggests that The Wonders was a big globetrotting tale, full of interlocking subnarratives and divided into twenty-four books. It apparently borrowed from sources both scholarly and fanciful, mashed up existing genres, played around with fictionality, and may have included the first literary voyage to outer space.

According to Photios, Diogenes claimed in a preface that The Wonders was actually a copy of a copy of a text discovered centuries before by a soldier in the armies of Alexander the Great. The soldier, Diogenes said, had been exploring the catacombs beneath the city of Tyre when he discovered a small cypress chest. On top of the chest were the words Stranger, whoever you are, open this to find what will amaze you, and when he opened it he found, engraved onto twenty-four cypress-wood tablets, the story of a journey around the world.

Acknowledgments

Profound thanks are due to three extraordinary women: to Binky Urban, whose enthusiasm for early drafts saw me through many months of doubt; to Nan Graham, who edited and improved more versions of this manuscript than I or she could count; and most of all, to Shauna Doerr, who spent much of our pandemic year hunched over pages of this book, who kept me from throwing it away on five separate occasions, and who fills my soul with music and my heart with hope.

Big thanks, too, to our sons Owen and Henry, who helped me dream up the Ilium Corporation and the dropped root beers of Alex Hess, and who make me laugh every day. I love you guys.

Thanks to my brother Mark for his abiding optimism; to my brother Chris who came up with the idea of Konstance using electrolysis to ignite her own hair; to my father, Dick, for cheering me up and on; and to my mother, Marilyn, for growing the libraries and gardens of my youth.