Ever since I was a child, I preferred the company of books to other people. My idea of a relaxing day was to walk to the library, which was a little over a mile from my house, and spend hours surfing the shelves, reading whatever I wanted. Books were my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This was how things went until I was well into high school. Suddenly my load of homework made it so I couldn’t spend as much time reading for pleasure as I would have liked, though I still tried to do it as much as I could. And then I got the letter.
It was a physical letter that came in my mailbox; that surprised me. Even then, it was more expected for people to communicate by email. The letter itself looked like the sort of thing you’d get from an elementary school. Big round friendly words, and a cartoon of a caterpillar with a graduation cap in an apple. It said:
Do you love books? Do you want to make the world a better place for book-lovers everywhere? Sign here and return this letter, and you will join the Official Bookworm Program, where we choose the best and brightest readers in the world to shape the future of books!
It sounded pretty neat, and I definitely needed some community service time, so I signed on the dotted line and put it back in the mailbox, presumably to be returned to whoever had sent it. A few days passed, and nothing happened. Then, I received a package in the mail. The package had a letter attached to it, with the same cartoon caterpillar as the first letter I’d gotten. When I opened the package, there was a book inside. A textbook on British aircraft from the second world war, to be exact. Attached to it was a bubble sheet, kind of like the ones you get on those SAT exams.
Each column was marked with a category, where I would have to evaluate the book on a scale of one to ten. The categories ranged from the obvious (“racism”, “homophobia”, “excessive political propaganda”) to the esoteric (“wanton cruelty to minors”, “inaccurate depictions of social justice issues”) to the downright bizarre (“species-ism”, “unlikable characters”, and even “ugly illustrations”). It said, furthermore, that I’d be paid for each book I reviewed and sent in, so I had some extra incentive to do these reviews.
Every week or so, I’d get one of these packages in the mail, review the book in it, and mail back the result– including the book– to the return address. Now, I know I said earlier that I was a major book lover, but most of the books I got were ones I’d never heard of. I didn’t care one way or the other, though. I was just happy that I was getting paid to read. It went that way for the next several months. Eventually I’d accumulated almost a thousand dollars in payment from whoever was in charge of this thing, something my parents were pretty confused by.
One thing that was never made clear to me, though, was exactly what I was reviewing these books for. Was it some sort of censorship board? I’ve always hated the very idea of censorship, and I’d hate to think that I was complicit in such a thing. Frustratingly there was no email address for the people in charge I could use to ask them, and the return address they provided was only supposed to be used for sending in reviews. So I never got any more information from them about what being an Official Bookworm entailed.
All of that changed in December of that year. But before I tell you that story, I need to tell you this story.
Think about all the popular kids’ novel franchises of the past couple decades for a minute. Surely, if you’re a Millennial like me, you were a fan of at least one of them. Maybe you were a big Harry Potter nut–you know, before J. K. Rowling turned out to be a complete turd. Or maybe things like The Hunger Games and Divergent, or even (ugh) Twilight were more your style. But there’s definitely a good chance you read the Archie Smith series. You just don’t remember it. No one except me does.
Archie Smith was a series of fantasy novels– probably the best way to describe them was a cross between Harry Potter and Pokemon, with characters who could tame powerful magical creatures and battled to save the world from evil forces. And when I was in high school, they were huge. There was an animated TV series, a theatrical film, video games, comics, the whole nine yards. People dressed up as the characters for Halloween, and took internet personality quizzes based on the series to add to their social media profiles. It was everywhere. But now it’s gone. Entirely gone– there isn’t even a Wikipedia article about it.
And it’s my fault.
I suppose I should back up a little bit. Before that fateful December day, I hadn’t really thought much about what happened to the books I reviewed. But then I received a package containing a copy of Archie Smith: Fey Keeper, the first book in the series. It was the first time I’d gotten a contemporary novel as one of my books to review; most of the previous ones had been either children’s books, old public domain novels, or nonfiction. I reviewed it in the same objective mindset as I did everything else, and sent it in.
That’s when I noticed that my collection of Archie Smith merchandise– all six of the novels, plus the video games and the comic books– had disappeared from my room. I went downstairs to ask my mother if she’d seen any of it, if I’d perhaps misplaced it, and she had no idea what I was talking about. That in and of itself was weird. I’d gotten her hooked on Archie Smith pretty early on, and she was almost as big a fan as I was. For her not to know what it was made no sense.
So then I called Marc, my friend from History class. Marc was another big Archie Smith fan, and if anyone knew what was going on, it would be him. But when I asked him if he’d seen my Archie Smith stuff, he was just as clueless as my mother. Finally, I did a Google search for it, and found nothing.
As far as I know, I’m the only person in the world who remembers that there was ever an Archie Smith franchise. While I have no way of knowing this for sure, my guess is that when I sent in my review of the book, it must not have satisfied the people in charge, and they somehow deleted it from existence, along with any proof it ever existed and any repercussions of it.
I said before that I hate censorship, and this is a big reason why. How many books did I inadvertently destroy in my job as an Official Bookworm? How much knowledge and information did I delete from reality? How many parallel timelines did I cause to never happen? The saying goes that knowledge is power, but that’s only part of it. The truth is, free knowledge is power. And I feel like the more I do this, the less free knowledge there is in the world.
So I leave you with this warning. If you love books, please, for the love of whatever deity you worship, make sure they can be preserved for the next generation. Don’t become a Bookworm.