Happy Dan Brown Day

Hooray! Today you can finally buy Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, a new interactive novel about a heroic professor with a mullet who fights Catholics and Masons. It will save publishing, and ruin Washington DC.

The Lost Symbol (the book is named for the archaic graphemes found throughout the book—when decoded these “alphabetic letters” make up the “text” of the novel) is expected to be the only book America buys this year, which sounds bad, but last year America didn’t buy any book (the last Harry Potter apparently came out in 2007). In addition to the publishing industry, the book is expected to save big box retailers, all of whom are suffering now because no one has enough income to buy shit anymore (thanks to NOBAMA’s massive tax hikes).

Barnes & Noble and Borders and Amazon are all going to sell the book for almost half off its retail price, and you can buy the electric Amazon Game Boy version of the book for a mere ten dollars!

In England, Asda, which is a grocery store (grocery stores are where English people buy their books and albums, which is why Vera Lynn is still the hottest recording artist in the UK), is selling Brown’s book for five pounds, which is like 10 bucks, give or take. Britishers are expected to ride double-decker buses driving down the wrong side of the street to buy the books in droves, as soon as the copies are unloaded from “lorries”.

Everyone acknowledges that the book isn’t actually any good, but everyone also agrees that that doesn’t matter.

And the book takes place, as we said, in Washington, which means it will be impossible to visit the following places for a couple years: The Library of Congress, the National Gallery, the Capitol Rotunda and the Smithsonian. And probably a bunch of other places! It will be kind of like what Sex & The City did to the West Village, except the people being inconvenienced will be even more annoying.

Also: Masons are totally thrilled to have a new book all about them, because maybe that will get the kids interested in Masonry again, like in the ’50s, the golden age of being a Mason.