Routine was Pearlroth’s ballast, habit his anchor. I repeat, he sat so many years on the same steel-hard oak chair, he grew mean, cauliflower-like boils on his buttocks. His wife of five decades said in the single five-minute interview she granted upon his death, that Norbert might as well have been paralyzed and mute for the little he moved or spoke in life. He was found deceased in his customary chair, his head on a biography of Nostradamus; the rubber-soled librarian had left him alone, presuming the man asleep, but by nightfall, when he was found, unmoved and alone in the two-block room with its hundreds of long polished tables and gleaming bronze lamps, it was confirmed he was no cat-napper but, (in fact!!) a corpse, his blue, ink-grimed fingernail pointing to his final fact-checked article:  Ripleymania hits Luverne, Alabama! “The Friendliest Town in the World,” on May 3, 1933, when an unprecedented number of townsfolk turned up in City Hall to compete for Believe It or Not contest prizes. One farmer showed off his four foot eleven inch snake cucumber, another a hand-shaped Danvers carrot, another gentleman owned a horned rooster named “El Diablo,” and a woman a footless Peking duck, an elementary school math teacher named Mr. Bubb, demonstrated holding a pencil under his ear, the painter’s wife held a one gallon varnish can between her shoulder blades. Presiding over the melee was Miss Annie Rainer Shine, banana plant grower, locally famous for having been mentioned in a special Believe It or Not column devoted to unusual names. Wearing a handmade, homegrown skirt stitched entirely of banana leaves, Miss Annie Rainer Shine awarded First Prize to a Miss E.E. Smith for growing her own hat, an Easter bonnet crocheted out of hair from her own head. Second Prize went to Mr. Waldo Rasmussen who ate and regurgitated a live albino mouse patriotically named FDR.

Slow as a snail, dun and small, Pearlroth tracked a wavery but resolute pearl-slime through 364,000 books. Listen: if you put your head down and turn your right or left ear against the very spot where Norbert perished, against the residue of his finger oil, hair oil and scalp drift, you may hear, much like the sound of the ocean surf inside of a conch shell, the whisper of bizarre facts, odd facts, terrifying truths, that never found their way into the public newspapers as grist for the American maw with its naïve, carnival appetites. The truth was: Norbert censored, withheld, pulled out, refused to disseminate. He had come to know truly terrible things about the human race, about the future and believed it his sacred duty to tell no one.