What is the origin story of a magical book?

What havoc might one raise in centuries, if not millennia of existence?

And how exactly might a cantankerous bookkeeper in remote part of Maine be at the center of such a mystery. We'll be exploring

all this in the coming season of Undertoe, the Dark Tome. Hi, this is Fred Greenhal, your host of

Undertoe, Realm's podcast, delving into the weird and the wicked. We've stumbled across this little

chapter that helps set up the story that's about to unfold for you.

It is about a curious, magical book from time immemorial, known either by its Latin name,

Libertonibris, or more commonly, the Dark Tome.

What follows today is the recording of one Wilbur Gussie, a proprietor of Gussie's rare books in Simpson Falls, Maine.

In fact, this little internet essay, first posted to an AOL forum on March 19, 1999,

kicked off a booming online sales market for Mr. Gussie, who has since become a hotly contested

figure in the legend and scholarship, as it were, surrounding the dark tone.

The more cynical say that this essay really was just a crass marketing stunt, the product of an overactive imagination,

and a man in a backwater town who wanted to start an internet mail order business, as he did back in the day.

Others have found some of its ideas quite credible, however.

Though any attempts to explore the origin and existence of an occult group called the Parabellum and its

related commercial arm, the Malius Corporation, have resulted in bleak outcomes to those explorers.

So where will you fall in all this? Is what you're about to hear truth or apocryphal,

or somewhere in between? Decide for yourself as we hear the curious history of the dark

tome.

The curious history of the Dark Tome

by W. Gussie, Gussie's rare books, Simpson Falls, Maine.

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