To get us started, I’ll begin with a folktale of my own.

There’s a bookstore in Manhattan, on 12th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. It’s called S.F. Vanni. It sells Italian books, or  used to; there are dusty old Italian books in its dusty old windows, but I can’t imagine anyone ever buys anything there. Friends have told me they’ve been inside, but I never have, though I’ve walked past many times. Sometimes I forget for years that S.F. Vanni exists, though I walk past it almost every day.

Someone once told me why the store is so decrepit, why its dirty windows are almost always hidden between steel security bars, why it is hardly ever open. I don’t remember who told me, and I’ve never been able to verify it, but here’s the story: Apparently, until the late 1960s, it was a normal store like any other, with customers and a stock that changed regularly. That all changed when the owner or a member of the owner’s family was murdered by a lunatic who walked in during store hours. Protective bars were installed, the owners, whoever was left, opened the place up more and more rarely,  and S. F. Vanni entered a peculiar alternate dimension of time, between past and present. It doesn’t really exist anymore, and nevertheless it’s still there. The truly odd thing is that the family didn’t simply sell the business, cash in on the value of the real estate, and move on. Instead the store remains, a relic of a distant era, receding further and further in time, almost invisible now — though it’s there before our eyes. Next time you walk down 12th Street, check it out.