A Second Monster

A Second Monster
Revelation 13.11-18

I sat in the room, surrounded by shelf after shelf of old books. It felt good. When we took a break from the seminar (it was in a hotel in a large American city), I got up and walked over to the nearest bookcase to inspect what treats it might hold in store. A rude shock awaited me. It wasn’t a bookcase; it was a fake. What seemed to be shelves were less than an inch deep. Worse, what looked like books were indeed books – or rather, parts of books. Hundred and hundreds of lovely old leather-bound books had had their spines, and the first half-inch of the book, cut off in order then to be glued to a back wall to make it look as though the room was a genuine library. It would have been easier, actually, to create the real thing with the same books. From then on I found the place creepy, and was glad to escape at the end of the day. It wasn’t the real thing; it was a parody...