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The Quire Catalogue: The Last Yellow Pages of Everything
Paperback
Series: How the Galaxy Gets By: A Trilogy of Cosmic Commerce, Book 3
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 11 2026
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.27 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Quire Catalogue: The Last Yellow Pages of Everything
A Novel from the 'How The Galaxy Gets By' Series
In a universe where every emotion has been assigned a μ-SATAC value and the General Unified Metric for Personalised Improvement (G.U.M.P.I.) has standardised everything from nutrient paste to nostalgia, one man decided to compile a directory of the beautiful, useless, and obsolete.
The Quire Catalogue is not a practical guide. It will not help you locate a reputable aura starching service, hire a reliable chrono-caretaker, or find a decent pint of probabilistic bitter. What it will do is introduce you to:
Helix, a psychic stenographer whose aura-spattered with the cosmic complaints of minor stars and grumbling concepts-requires crisis pressing from a dry cleaner who charges in existential dread and leaves him smelling of ozone and moral superiority
Sediment, a pet rock whose unrequited love for a piece of blue slate becomes a geological tragedy of continental-drift proportions
Milo, a clerk trapped in a Tuesday of infinite duration at Bertie's Best Borscht, where the soup refuses to achieve thermal equilibrium and the only exit is through consumption
K'lix, a minor deity of mildly inconvenient epiphanies, who discovers that the Soul Patch Kit(TM) for divine dings leaves him with a sticky, show-tune-singing accretion of metaphysical lint
Elara, a poet who pawned her own word for cerulean and now must buy it back from a fence of lost language
Quire himself, a man who accidentally becomes a sovereign nation-state when the rumour he plants-that his Catalogue contains a secret map-mutates into the belief that he is the territory
But this is more than a cabinet of curiosities. Woven through the entries is the story of Lyra, a doctoral candidate who stumbles upon the Catalogue in a dusty archive and feels something she cannot explain: a twinge, a sympathetic resonance, the faint tuning-fork ping of a soul recognising kindred whimsy. Her journey from scholar to co-conspirator mirrors our own-from detached observer to someone who, when faced with a recorded message declaring that all spiritual stains are now a uniform shade of acceptable, simply refuses to hang up.
When G.U.M.P.I. issues a Public Notice declaring Quire's entire world-the Déjà Vu Dispensary, Mendelson's Mending, the Rumour Mills, the Xenobiotic Tailors-obsolete and de-ratified, the Catalogue transforms from elegy to eviction notice. And in the inside cover, Quire has left one last thing: a personal ad, seeking a collaborator who understands that useful is the least interesting thing something can be.
Part novel, part directory, part insurrectionary handbook, The Quire Catalogue is a love letter to everything that cannot be quantified, optimised, or standardised. It is a graveyard with hilarious epitaphs, a party to which all the best guests are already ghosts, and-if you read it right-a toolkit for strategic weirdness in a world that has forgotten how to get lost.
Welcome to the 'How The Galaxy Gets By' series: stories about the infrastructure of wonder, the economy of the absurd, and the people who keep the beautiful, useless things running.
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