Babylonian Dutchman

“An old friend who settled on the coast of the Adriatic Sea said that one day a ship entered their port, which turned out to be a floating book shop, which had already been around the world with a load of literature mainly in English. Anyone could go on board and buy a rare book there or order a photocopy, really for a penny. A wonderful humanitarian project, you can not say anything; My friend, as far as I know, seriously plans to climb on board the book ship as a volunteer - and who would stand in his place? My unreliable memory almost immediately turned a floating book shop into a library - it is clear that the ship loaded with books should be The library, not a store, is the very case when in fiction there is much more truth than in documentary facts. Gradually, an imaginary bibliotek ship became so real for me that sometimes it happened to me to scratch his elbow, accidentally touching his rough side. In the end, the writer Dmitry Deich directly asked why I would not write a book about this ship. This idea captured me entirely. And fortunately, not only me, because such things are not done alone. Labor work. We wrote this book for almost two years, all together, but everyone is completely solitude. We collected it as a mosaic of colorful, scattered, often completely heterogeneous fragments. The result was a book about many different ships and libraries, the magnificent alchemical sum of which is the “Babylonian Dutchman.”