Fall, 1958.

Robbery. A handsome word. Reminds me of Antonio Banderas doing a Robin Hood. I was reading when I should have been fornicating butter-scotched lasses behind the Tangerine tree in the grove. No, I wasn't a nerd. I found characters more delectable than the bad odour of the morning breath, that was all. So here I was reading about The "Rare Books" Section at the House of Wisdom. Whoa! ' The rarest of the rare books from the East and West hemispheres housed in the Grand Library of Baghdad, the Library of Congress of its time. It was the single largest library in the world, and contained some of the oldest books ever written from three continents. It's also where the Persians likely kept the greatest hits from their history, including discoveries in science, medicine, astronomy and technology that made them the biggest swinging dick on the planet for several centuries.

The card catalog alone would be considered priceless. The library was like a rough draft of a university, it was where everyone went to learn. Not only could this create a checklist for countless works we know nothing about, but possibly subjects we could never know about, such as extinct animals or plant-life (the Romans supposedly had a plant that was such a good form of birth control they farmed it to extinction... imagine cloning that).
And since Baghdad was once the capital of the world for science and mathematics, books like Space Travel by Mohamed, How I Cured AIDS by Hippocrates or E.T. Episode I - They Came In Peace by Ezekiel would have likely been in their possession. Probably.' *

That stuck. Meaning, I didn't turn to robbery as the last resort of a scoundrel. On the contrary. I was rich by inheritance and incredibly bored with wealth. This sounded good enough for a man of precarious ethics. Robbery. In broad day light. Why I could even dis-rob a girl, if I chose! A girl like the Sleeping Beauty. No fetish is more exciting than lifting the gown of a sleeping nubile girl. Yes, yes, I know it is taboo - but then I am an outsider, remember. A robber is always an outcast, hence sanctioned to commit all the sins in the testament.

Those was my post-major years in college. I was hopping about, in search of an adventure.Serendipity was my mistress and she dropped a gem for me to start my game of cat and mouse. I chanced upon a small shred of paper. An old one. Looked pretty ancient. Perhaps the second edition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. 

I didn't bother much about it, except keep it in a tin of biscuits.

The next day I came across a priest who was supposedly mad, blabbering about The Lost Sayings of Jesus. Upon more intimate investigation with a female curator, I gathered that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were identical and could have come from a source called the Q Document. It was never found, but grapevine went that it was somewhere out there. The issue didn't have anything to do about Christianity or any religious sect, but it all seemed to stem from the sayings of people who KNEW something or two about spirit and ' experiences.'

Well. I could make out this was somehow part of that stuff. But, alas, digging deeper, I found out that it was part of an obit in a newspaper. But that turned my luck further.

* http://www.cracked.com/article/18368_7-books-we-lost-to-history-that-would-have-changed-world/#ixzz37ls3RCUX