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The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale

Publisher’s Preface

In a copy of The Encyclopedia of Wind Roses printed in 1872, bought quite accidentally in a secondhand bookstore in Zürich, instead of the final signature which was missing, I found a manuscript dated 1892, written in calligraphy. The contents of the manuscript (which was, in fact, a copy of another) changed the direction of my life to a great extent, as you will see, just as it changed the life of the copyist. I do not possess a single proof that would support the validity of the lines which follow. It is possible that the whole thing is a joke. Someone with an English sense of humor (the copyist is English) is doubtlessly willing to undertake extensive and expensive preparations in order to, after his own death, make fools of a small group of unknown people. My intuition convinces me otherwise. In any case, whether the facts correspond to reality or whether they are the fruit of someone’s imagination, I believe it is worthwhile to publish this carefully selected text, printed in six copies, and I now send it into the world to find its six readers.

Rheiner Meier

Zürich, 1903