From the only surviving scrap of papyrus
traced to the library of Alexandria:
Head Librarian,
I hate to intrude on your vacation,
but the stacks are on fire.
I hope the weather is fine
in Pamukkale. I have heard
the flow of water has been slowing down
in the last few years. There is
a very fine restaurant in Hierapolis
by the name of
[fragment missing]
vomiting on the boat. But the trip
wasn't all bad,
the kids enjoyed it.
In any event, the library is gone. Caesar
accidently burned it down a few days ago.
He set several boats on fire, or somwthing.
Worse than that, his boats were uninsured.
Almost all of the old Greek works
have already been destroyed, except
all our cheap paperback copies of Aeschylus.
We'll have to order more once the repairs are finished.
Unfortunately, the Greek works weren't
the only losses.
Take a deep breath. We lost everything.
we only managed to save two of the books in Homer's
old "Adventures of Odysseus" series.
I know, they're out of print.
We'll never really know the losses,
either, except by memory---the indices were burnt, too.
In retrospect, our policy of keeping all twelve copies
of the index scrolls and codices
next to each other, in adjacent cubbies,
wasn't such a good idea. Most
of the assistant librarians quit.
You will be relieved, I know, to hear that I did manage
to save the most important book of all, however, a single copy
of
[fragment ends]
