There It sat. Clad in a black and red jacket; beneath that, a murky dark­ness devoid of red. In a shelf betwixt hun­dreds of oth­ers, the weight of them call­ing against It. The­o­rists of what was, rather than what could be, called out around it; of things past (though now, of course, It had also moved into that same past); even the chil­dren sat obliv­i­ous to it. Within crawl­ing reach, they debated what today’s would be — clearly, some rit­ual was being played out, sit­ting on the floor. The mother squat­ted, mov­ing between the gaze of the two, lean­ing to turn a page, some­times two. Its colours were crisp, but not against the pic­tures accom­pa­ny­ing words (though words may first accom­pany pic­tures) in folio-sized glossy colour. The lit­tle red book clad in dark­ness said noth­ing against them, did not try to plead its case. The chil­dren were obliv­i­ous, any­way. Grad­u­ally, the mother grows tired of wait­ing and pulls out a (prob­a­bly recur­ring) threat, another piece of the rit­ual: per­haps we won’t get a book this week? No, of course we shall. It is an empty threat — even the chil­dren know this. The book would splut­ter, groan at the bour­geois’ idle­ness and com­mit­ment to acquis­i­tive ‘edu­ca­tion’. But It could not, the super­stra­tum of cap­i­tal­ism wrapped tightly around it, even as it is released unequiv­o­cally into the domain of the peo­ple. Des­tined to life on a shelf in a world as for­eign as it has always been.