The Story of a Royal Road Trade

“Quack!” he greets you warmly, and bids you examine his wares. There is a respectable selection of bread, crumbs, and coffee. He tells you that he makes the crumbs himself. With a piece of bread between his wings, he asks if you were interested in a demonstration.

“This is nice,” you say, “but I was searching for something else.”

“Quack,” he replies. He humbly notes that he is not, in fact, a man selling ducks. He apologises if you have been misled.

You assure him that you were not. Or perhaps you were. It does not matter. You explain that what you truly seek is a book.

“Quack.” There is understanding in his voice. He understands that there is no fooling you. You know. Yes, he is the Duck Merchant. And he is also the Book Merchant.

He leads you into the small shop behind his market stall. There is more bread and coffee here. Also, a small wooden writing desk and a shelf with books. This is what you came for. You step forward to examine the books. You lift one from the shelf, only to discover the pages are blank. It is the same for the next three books you pick out.

“There is nothing in them?” you ask.

“Quack,” he compliments your attentive eye, recognising in you the discerning spirit of a true connoisseur of the craft.

“Wait, so all of these are blanks?” you repeat, turning another empty book in your hands. “Is this a joke?”

“Quack. Quack? Quack. Quack.”

What follows is a winding philosophical discourse. He speaks at length about the dialectics of text and absence, about the interrelationship of intertextual identity and metatextual matter. You are utterly captivated. With startling precision, he frames his argument in terms of semiotic potential: these blank volumes exist simultaneously as both vessels of meaning and as voids awaiting inscription. They are books, and at the same time, they are not; paradoxes of existence that mirror the human condition itself, oscillating between essence and nothingness.

As he continues, the scope of his thought pushes you to uncomfortable depths. His words edge into questions of selfhood, memory, and the psychology of narrative identity. You begin to wonder whether your own existence is as fragile, as contingent, as these empty pages. You truly wonder who you are, and where, as you continue, right here and now, to read into existence, from a black and white text, a being that stares on a blank page; both you.

You dare not give voice to such a thought, lest his reply undo you entirely. So at last, you cautiously cut him off.

“What I meant, then, was not a book but a story,” you insist, steadying yourself. “I heard you have stories.”

“Quack.”

That reassures you.

You wait, as the Duck and Book Merchant retrieves the single book that rests upon his desk.