Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I get that you’re just throwing dinosaur DNA at the wall to see what sticks, I really do. But this time you’ve gone too far.”

“Nonsense. Once it learns how to balance, my giraffe with t-rex arms will be an unstoppable force!”

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“This piece represents the struggle of man against nature, the struggle of nature agains man, and the musical interplay between them both.”

“I see. What do you call it?”

“The pianist who has been turned into a tapir.”

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The tape is well, worn, the cardboard box covering it bleached by sun and barely holding together. Singalong Weasel, copyright 1985. The animation is very limited, and hundreds of plays have given the picture a fuzzy, lived-in quality. The songs, all nursery rhymes, are warmly and full of the vibrato that comes with lost media. As the tape plays on, the lyrics seem oddly wrong. Words are dropped here, replaced there. Was the song always about a burglar in the straw? Surely the three blind lice did not have their scales cut off with a pruning knife. The box says 35 minutes, but the VCR timer is at two hours. Did they even finish the animation here? It seems too slow, the pitch of the voice is all wrong, it seems too low. The lyrics sing of a turnkey with a cause, how Mary had to lift a hand to crease the time that flows. A door opens in the distance, even as the singing continues, lower and slower, lower and slower. Something is coming through. Pattycake, patty cake, on the way a cursed man, make your E S C A P E as fast as you C A N

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Attested only from two specimens collected in 1907 and 1909 near the Khyber Pass, the Baja reticulates or reticulated cobra is sometimes called the “unicorn cobra” due to its rarity. Due to the difficulty in accessing its Afghan habitat during the 20th century, it has been the subject of much speculation, with some even guessing that the specimens were forgeries.

After a systematic search in late 2003 collected some sub fossil remains, a partial gene sequence was obtained that seemed to indicate that the reticulated cobra was a distinct species, perhaps a relict, and possibly a member of its own genus. Its current taxonomic status remains in dispute, with the IUCN listing it as Data Deficient while NatureServe classifies it as GX, Presumed Extinct.

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“Rescuing cats is one thing. Running a cat sanctuary is another. But this?” Ben indicated the gene-splicing equipment with a wave of his hand. “This is too far.”

“I’ve had a singular vision, an image which has haunted my waking and sleeping hours for years,” Liz said. “A color spectrum made entirely out of cats, one for every color of the rainbow. I’ve got every natural color variation, all the richest yellows, oranges, and whites. But it’s not enough. And these jellyfish genes are the only way to make that vision a reality.”

“And what happens then?”

“The gate opens, my friend. The gate opens.”

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As anyone alive in 2003 will remember, the “Lemon Shark” ditty was everywhere for a few months. Starting off as a simple advertising hook for R1ngt0nes.Biz, along with four others (Orange Bear, Lime Tiger, Tangerine Lion), Lemon Shark quickly eclipsed the others and became the focus of a sustained advertising campaign. Combined with a variety of lemon sharks, including CGI and men in suits, an extended version of the song even charted in both the UK and the US.

Of course, there was a downside to the fad, and a reason that it disappeared more quickly and completely than most. R1ngt0ne.biz didn’t sell ringtones, but rather sold subscriptions to a ringtone service that charged $20 per month for access to a library of 20,000 tones, including Lemon Shark. Most people, upon receiving their first month’s bill, called to complain and within a year the company was so inundated by lawsuits and complaints that its Delaware business license was revoked. While Lemon Shark was sold (to Guangzhang Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. d/b/a Harmonium Labs), the subsequent uses of the character very quickly sank into obscurity.

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The Ingram Expedition, also known as the Erstwhile Expedition after its main vessel, HMS Erstwhile, was an attempt on the Northwest Passage. While not as infamous as the lost Franklin Expedition that preceded it, the Ingram Expedition is noteworthy for the unusual method in which it met its end.

Ingram had been a mate on one of the many expeditions funded by Lady Franklin to find her husband, and had arrived home determined to make his own attempt at the route. In Ingram’s mind, the lack of appropriate stores was the major problem for any such expedition, and so he set to work finding a way for his ship to can and preserve the meat that it hunted along the way for future use.

In doing so, he collaborated with “Doctor” Omar Cyrus to create and perfect a portable cannery that would produce long-lasting and shelf-stable foods. Ingram was recorded as boasting that his “shelf-stable puffin” hunted in the Grand Banks would see his crew through the Passage. There was just one problem: Cyrus was an utter charlatan, with a fake medical degree and no actual experience in canning or preservation. His equipment and methods were, by and large, useless and led to spoiled stores or worse, outbreaks of acute botulism. This was discovered in a major food scandal not long after Ingram had set out, but a cutter sent to intercept him was unable to locate HMS Erstwhile.

The ship was eventually located off Baffin Island, having drifted some distance from its route and become icebound. Several men who had died of botulism were aboard, and the local Inuit led searchers to the graves of the few survivors, whom they had been powerless to help.

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Created as a tongue-in-cheek riposte to the “World’s Largest Ball of String” tourist trap, the “World’s Smallest Ball of String” was made by nanoscale researchers at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology using an extremely fine thread of synthetic spider silk spun on a custom loom (also nanoscale) into thread before being balled up. A similarly nanoscale cat was prepared, but largely ignored.

The tiny string ball received coverage from many mainstream media outlets, and many high-resolution pictures were distributed to the media. The team was even nominated for an Ig Nobel Prize, though they ultimately lost to a team that had developed oral contraceptives for domestic rabbits.

Capitalizing on the easy availability of photos and information (as an NSF grantee, all information about the research was open-access), an enterprising huckster opened a roadside attraction claiming to have the world’s smallest ball on display. Using photos and information about the real ball, the proprietors charged $5 a head to look through an “electron microscope” at the ball, while really just rigging a projector to an ordinary magnifier. Local government officials estimate that the con artists made close to half a million dollars before their scheme was blown by a statement from the original team, clarifying that the original ball had been unwound and destroyed immediately after it had been photographed.

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Upon following the cat to the beach, Newberg discovered that it was digging clams out of the sand and eating them, a novel behavior never before observed in feral domestic cats. It used its claws to open some of the clams, and seemed to have formed a sort of symbiosis with local gulls for the more stubborn ones; the cat would allow the gulls to pick up and drop the clams onto rocks to break them, before chasing the gull away to eat.

The cat’s close association with water and clams continued after it gave birth to a litter of kittens, with Newberg observing three of the six kittens engaging in clam-digging behavior themselves. He speculates that the behavior could have spread to other feral cats in the area had it not been for the arrival of Hurricane Irv, which made landfall as a Category 5 storm and demolished the beach the cats had been using. Newberg never saw any of them again after the storm, and no further examples of cats digging for clams were recorded over the next ten years.

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Lot #2201: taxidermied Virginia opossum, upright, with clock in mouth. This was Mayfield’s attempt to create an art piece that mirrored one of the persistent visions of which she had been complaining in the year before her death. Specifically, she insisted that the opossum was a manifestation of a Muskogee psychopomp that would visit the soon-to-be-deceased to remind them of their mortality. Nga-to-fe-do, she called it, the Time Devourer. Mayfield’s close friends, worried, consulted the Muskogee Nation’s official historian, who confirmed that no such psychopomp existed in Muskogee religion, and that Mayfield’s name for it was “not necessarily nonsense but definitely not Muskogee.”

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