Heartbroken

I had a dream last night that I was in a bookstore and came across a positively enormous book. It was maybe three feet tall, eighteen inches across, and about a foot thick, and they had them stacked all over the “new hardbacks” table, and it was bound in a deep jewel-tone blue in some nice, soft, firm material that wasn’t leather, and I opened it up and here are some of the things that were inside:

1) A graphic novel about the early life of Jesus, written by Annie Dillard and illustrated by John Bolton and Melinda Gebbie
2) The original script to Joss Whedon’s abandoned Wonder Woman movie project
3) A graphic novel about the sex life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, written and illustrated by Alison Bechdel
4) A new epistolatory novel by Jincy Willett, in the form of a fictionalized correspondence between a deceased Alice Liddell and a still-living Yoko Ono
5) A posthumously-discovered alternate ending to The Heart of the Matter written by Graham Greene, and a point-counterpoint textual analysis of it by Thomas Merton and Kathleen Norris
6) Oh much more that I can’t remember now
7) A foreword written by Joss Whedon explaining that he’d personally financed the printing of this book, that it had been prohibitively expensive because nobody would underwrite him because nobody believed there was a readership for any of these things, and that was why the book was so expensive

I looked at the price tag on the table and it said “$2999.90,” and I was going, “If I live on bread and apples for the next fifteen years, and never buy any new clothes, and sell everything I own except the bare necessities on eBay, can I… because I MUST…”

And then I looked inside the book and saw that it actually cost “$299.99,” and somebody had just misplaced a decimal, and I BOUGHT it and was carrying it home in my arms when I woke up.