8:44 AM
This spring I read Glen David Gold's fantastic novel Carter Beats the Devil. It may not have the social context of Kavalier and Clay, but I would argue that it has twice the narrative strength; I read the hardcover from beginning to end, went back to the beginning, and read it through again. I don't remember the last time I did that.

Believe me when I say it's a terrific book.

So I bought my mom a copy of the newly-released trade paperback and brought it along when I went to see them last weekend. When I was handing the book over, I felt something odd. I had to wait until Mom had finished looking at the book to check it out, but there it was: a row of raised bumps along the bottom of the front cover. Braille!

Strange; I know for certain that the Braille wasn't on my hardcover. Trapped far from a Net connection, all I could do was make a rubbing and ruminate.



(Note that you can see the Braille on Amazon's larger version of the trade cover.)

Okay, I did try and decode the letters using brute force, but as there were only ten symbols (out of a possible twenty-six) and fifteen 'letters', it was a bit of a lost cause.

However, upon returning to Madison, I...well, I watched Alias. But then I pulled up an online Braille alphabet and went to work:



So the question is: what does this mean? I can think of at least one character in the novel that it might refer to, but I can't see why that datum would be important enough to encode on the front of the novel. The obvious Google searches turn up nothing useful.

Another reading of the novel is obviously in order.

UPDATE: Someone who works with Jon has reminded me what in the book this refers to, but I still wonder why they did it. I suppose it was just a neat thing to toss in while embossing the cover, but ever since the AI game, I always wonder when I see something like this...