You can go into the Stacks with a mission, but the real fun is in finding the unexpected. Every time you glance at a shelf, you see interesting things. This "absolutely truthful narrative" of spirit journeys to Mars was published in 1905 and includes thirteen drawings of Martian flora. It's in pristine condition and copies are going for a pretty penny on Ebay. It's classified as fiction now, but in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Volume 7, published in 1913, the Society was gaga over the alleged fact that an intelligent but uneducated and unread farmer's daughter could produce a work of this nature. It's 548 pages of articulate claptrap on a scale with the Book of Urantia. (Or any other "revealed" book, for that matter.) You can read it on Google Books if you're curious.

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