What is true? How do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives connect to what is actually happening in and around us? Hmmm.

In any case, here’s what we at Skullvalley After Whistletown, Bookmakers believes about ourselves:

This bookmaking company has and always will be, an eternal publishing house with its foundation squarely rooted beyond timespace, but yet with face and fingers reaching into and through all timespaces, where it reads, considers, writes, and publishes works of eternal Truth = Beauty = Knowledge = Justice < Pure Love.

The founders and chief editors of SAWB, Tun Whistletown & Archibald Skullvalley, are likewise eternal and infinite, though within this realm they of course dress up in mundane (and, to be brutally honest, somewhat gaudy) shapes and sounds.

Bartleby Willard is a self-creating fiction who one day wandered into the SAWB offices at Somewhere Sometime, Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, found an unoccupied space, and declared himself a live-in staff-writer. SAWB management in their infinite wisdom (and/or indifference) obliges Bartleby, and have assigned one of their least reliable editors, Tun Whistletown’s feckless older brother Amble Whistletown, to Bartleby. BW & AW quickly became fast friends and their literary collaborations have been fruitful, if thus far difficult to organize and impossible to market.

All was going well, but then things fell apart. How? Why? Those details are unknown as they’ve not yet been written; but perhaps someday Bartleby Willard will complete Diary of An Adamant Seducer (now renamed Diary of an Adamant Lover and completed, but then retracted and [as of August 2025] still awaiting rerelease); then, assumedly, we’ll have a plausible-enough account. For now, all we know is that the SAWB staff is scattered and torn, lonely in lost in the dark cold wind-howling hollows.

[This is the introduction to Part 4: Frame Stories of Bartleby Willard’s A Readable Reader, available on our Buy the Books page.]