Dearest Readers,

There comes a time in every wizard’s life when he feels the weight of the world upon him. When the vast empty tower looming over their domain feels empty no matter how many tomes of boundless lore are stuffed within its shelves. A time when they no longer have any court mandates dictating their movements and actions, and as such they are free to make decisions for themselves once more. 

In short, my stalwart companions, the time has come for me to select an apprentice from amidst the thronging mass of the unworthy. Someone to whom the full weight of my immense wisdom may be passed down. While I have an abundance of worthy candidates doing their best to force entry to my tower even now, I find them all sorely lacking.

What knows some pampered second-born prince of the world that an adventurer must travel through? What knows some slack-mouthed farmhand of the mysteries of the arcane? They are all pitifully mundane, and unaccustomed to the strains and pressures that a wizard must delve through as though he were a whale in the ocean.

Please send any and all applications for the role in writing to the usual address. Ideally accompanied by a resume extolling your virtues, a woodcut of both yourself and any attractive family members and of course, proof that you are possessed of the natural gift of magic. Failure to obey these simple instructions shall be repaid with a baleful polymorph, and my understanding is that your world is already burdened with an overabundance of toads.

***

Dear Ulesorin,

My family keep complaining I have too many books. Naturally, I disagree, as of course it isn’t hoarding when it’s books. But I do concede that storage is becoming an issue, with no current possibility of installing more shelves. I have tried to assess my collection and reduced it by one or two tomes, but I can’t part with any more, and the collection keeps growing…

Do you have any suggestions on how I can either store my books or appease my family?

Regards,

Voracious Reader

***

My Dear Voracious, it seems that you are a reader after my own heart. Which is to say, one who refuses to part with any book lest the arcane formulae within should later prove vital to the undoing of some terrifying monstrosity from beyond the bounds of time and space.

Tomes were not meant to be so readily discarded. Indeed, haphazard disposal of books of magic have caused a great many tragedies throughout history, ranging from the False God’s War to that time that the local bartender mistook an item in lost and found for a recipe book and rendered his entire town dead. If you have not seen death by spontaneous rodent expulsion from every orifice, I assure you that it is harrowing, and easily on par with the nightmarish onslaught of fake wizards that nearly undid all of creation.

As far as storage goes, you may be overlooking the space upon the ceilings. Simply rotate gravity upon them by one hundred and eighty degrees then stack to your heart’s content. Why, I do not even need to look where I am putting a book anymore, I merely finish it, toss it up into the air, and the weight of the thing stows it away for me. Admittedly, I cannot entertain any particularly tall guests anymore, but that is a small price to pay.

As for appeasing your family, may I suggest that you do away with them entirely. The pursuit of higher learning is a far more noble calling than procreation, parenting or spousal relations. Just think how much more space you shall have for books once they have been evicted from your tower! Why in only a century or two, you could be just like me.

***

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*Disclaimer: All answers are provided for entertainment purposes only. It may not be in your best interests to follow advice provided by a 1794-year-old man who thinks that his divorce from a dragon only went bad because he employed kobolds as his legal team.