Introducing… APOCRYPHA

BTMU is dead; long live Apocrypha!

apocrypha (noun): writings of uncertain authenticity.

There are three versions of the story of how this substack came to be.

I.

The first is the simplest:

I reached out to many of the writers I found in this thread, and asked them to collaborate on the esoteric and unusual pieces that shall be published in what is now called APOCRYPHA.

II.

The second story goes like this:

As many of you will know, I have spent the last two years travelling across Europe. In that time, I’ve kept up one of my favourite pastimes — collecting old maps, strange documents, rare books, and antique oddities. Even before my travels, I collected rapaciously, spending many a weekend digging fervently through flea market stalls, browsing online marketplaces, and rummaging among the dusty back-shelves of London’s antique shops.

It is remarkable what rarities one can find in such places, and for such a pittance, if one knows where to look. From an out of the way junk shop in Viségrad to Istanbul’s old bazaar, from a shady Albanian contact made in Rome to a street seller in Bucovina, I have haggled and bartered my way into the possession of oblique and esoteric papers. Papers long forgotten, long hidden from public view.

In my contacts with various dealers, bibliophilic eccentrics, and genuine crackpots, I have procured collectibles, one-offs, fakes, forgeries, and, once, was even offered a snake as part of an exchange (I declined). But, as much as I enjoy the thrill of the search, and the reverence that comes with handling such old books and maps (sometimes centuries old), it has begun to feel selfish to hold them in private, their secrets unbeknown to the world. Hoarding my ever-increasing pile of collected items feels less like fun and more a shameful act. I have sat on them for far too long — in the case of some of my African papers, for over a decade — it is time to share them with you.

As to their authenticity I can’t always speak. One of the great challenges of dealing with antique documents is in the verification of provenance; a 15th century treatise on the mating practices of moths could in fact be a strange hoax, perpetrated in order to swindle some easily excited collector a century ago; a rare print edition of Dari poetry might in fact be a rebound shipping manual, unbeknown to the uninitiated amateur who can’t read the PersoArabic script. I have done my best to verify and authenticate what I can, and I’ve sought the help of the best translators my modest means is able to afford to transliterate the more obscure texts.

So, alongside our guest features, our upcoming book club (to be announced soon), and other such community-fare, these abstruse papers and cryptic texts shall make up the published materials of what shall henceforth be called APOCRYPHA.

III.

The third, and closest to the truth, is the version of the story I am most reluctant to share:

Once I met a traveller from an oblique land; he spoke tales of a country far from here.

Somewhere among the desert wastes of outer Oukbahr, lies a castle that cannot be reached, guarded by a doorkeeper who cannot be passed. Beyond even the farthest boundary of its gleaming white walls a labyrinth of dunes, never touched by rain or camel’s feet, stretches far beyond the horizon. Out there, he said, untouched by nomads or the caravan trains, there is a pit. A pit of secrets. 

Taking shelter from a sandstorm one fateful day, this traveller, blown far off course, dishevelled and desperate for respite from the howling winds, discovered by mistake a trove of genizot – dusty cuneiform tablets, half rotten papyri, countless books – half sunk at the pit’s bottom. As he began to wearily dig them up, he first assumed he’d found the remnants of some half-forgotten civilisation — an Isidoraa or a Zaira — but to his horror he soon began to recognise many of the words; here and there were books he had read as a child, a letter he had once received from a dear friend, even notes he had written in his own hand. In terror he realised that what he had uncovered was not only all the literature that has ever been — every book, scroll, scrap of parchment, notebook squiggle, absent-minded jotting, email, text, even the graffiti scrawled on bathroom walls, everything — but also all things that will ever be written in the future, including this very passage.

I didn’t think much of the man’s tale until a few years ago, when by unexpected circumstances — which I have not the time nor inclination to divulge here — I came into the possession of a stack of papers which happened to originate from that very pit, which hitherto I had deemed a madman’s fiction. Those papers contained within them strange and oblique tales, dark philosophies, and esoteric poetry. After much deliberation, I have decided I have sat on them long enough; it’s time to share them with the world. Those texts, unedited and unabridged, shall make up the bulk of the material published in what shall be known henceforth as APOCRYPHA. 

What you will find within their passages, only you can know.

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