ONLY IN YOUR HEAD

In this bookstore dream, I've apparently been away at a comic book convention. I'm brought back to NYC by a cab driver who insists on escorting me down an even further Blade Runnerized 42nd Street than the one I recall leaving.

I need to find my particular subway, but instead we take the first available station. I go past the token clerk (token clerk? Am I in an Eisner story? A Krigstein story?) and find myself going down a rabbit hole, one that happens to be lined with bookshelves.

Conveniently, it's the entrance to a bookstore within the subway station.

Of course, the lower level is surrounded by books I've never laid eyes on before. Did you know First Second produced a behemoth-sized Artists' Edition? Of course you didn't. There are reproductions of a Christmas book by Goya and a Hogarth narrative I didn't know existed.

Especially puzzling is a reproduction of an old volume that comes in a box, because, like the artifact it's based on, the cover has separated from it and the gauzy binding barely holds the pages together. I'm trying to examine one copy of this to buy, but I find I'm in the children's section. My, that Mo Willems is prolific. I have balanced my stack of potential purchases at the end of a display, when an employee asks if I need help today.

Well, I've often been told to get help, but I'm beyond what most people can offer, so I go back to trying to make sense of the book.