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The thought came to Giovanni Spirelli between appointments with students. It stayed with him all day, through a lecture on advanced trigonometry, a meal of cod and chips and a visit from his brother-in-law. The next day he set about creating his great catalogue. He would collect ideas and index them and make them available to people who needed them. There were too many repositories of facts. Where did facts ever get anyone. Facts explained past and present. But ideas were like the master-keys to the doors to the future. Armed with a good idea a person could become what they had never imagined. He remembered. He’d once been a shepherd; a man of simple facts—the habits of foxes, the phases of the moon.

On July third, 2015 Giovanni uploaded the first of his ideas (item number 00000001, catalogue reference number 34.585a) Idea, Category: General, Subcategories: Enterprise, Conjecture. A library of ideas would benefit the world. He invited submissions and new items flooded in. The Library of All Notions flourished.

Towards the end of 2018 Giovanni sold a large stake in his library to an American venture capitalist. He packed a few simple things into his ageing Citroen and returned to the town of his youth, where he paid a happy farmer a small part of his fortune. He threw the Citroen in for good measure. Giovanni Spirelli gathered a small flock of black-faced sheep and headed into the foothills and the mountains beyond, stretching away as far as the eye could see.

This entry was posted on February 10, 2013 at 9:00 AM and is filed under stories with tags flash fiction, microfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.