Flatland: A Mystery of Many Dimensions

I was shelving books at work today-yesterday, when I came across a copy of "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott. I know the inventory of books pretty well by now, if I do say so myself, and I happened to know that we were supposed to have 5 copies of Flatland, but when I went to shelve the loose copy, I noticed that there were already 5 on the shelf.

Mystere!

I thought the Bookmaster (BM; computer program that tells you the number of each book the store has in stock) was mistaken, and so I shelved the loose copy and changed the number in the BM from 5 to 6.

A few hours later, I came back from lunch, and guess what lay innocently on the desk, but another copy of "Flatland"! Maybe someone picked it up, but decided against buying it and didn't put it back in its proper place, that bastard! I thought. And so I picked up the loose copy and went to shelve it, only to find that there were already 6 copies on the shelf!

Double mystere!

By now, I was slightly freaked out because I knew that "Flatland" was about 2-dimensional shapes discovering higher dimensional space, and here before my very eyes, the stockpile of Flatland copies was growing- or under my nose, since I didn't know what or who was causing the growth. They were like stubborn weeds, cropping up in random corners of the Bookiverse in unwanted numbers.

What could I do but shelve the 7th copy and change the number in the BM from 6 to 7?

Now, I'd like to say that this mysterious increase continued until we were up to our ears in copies of Abbott's sci-fi classic because that would certainly heighten the tension and mystery and absurdity of the situation, but in truth, this bookstore mystery, at least, was solved pretty soon after the 2nd extra copy was found.

Turns out that "Flatland" had been assigned as a reading for some Penn course, and so students thinking about taking the course were bringing down copies of the book from the Textbooks section and leaving them around the store, inadvertantly creating a strange scavenger hunt of sorts.

For a while, though, I couldn't tell which side of the looking glass I was on. I was living the written word. Bookstore life is so damnably exciting.

This incident reminds me of the time we were hunting around for 3 missing copies of "The Book Thief". Come to think of it, I don't think we ever recovered those...