It's daunting to think of all the books that would enrich our lives (and our writing, in the case of readers who are also writers) if we read them, but that we don't even know exist. In an age of frenetic overabundance like ours, perhaps this is one of the main missions of publishing houses, which conceive of literature not only as a business but also as a discovery, a broadening, and an exploration of knowledge and experience of the world. The mission would not so much consist of rescuing books from oblivion—because only those that have been taken into account fall into oblivion—but rather of making known that certain ignored books exist and presenting them in such a way that it is clear that they are worth reading. This is what the publishing house Males Herbes has done by publishing this exuberant and chaotic phantasmagoria entitled The traveler and the clarity of the moon, by Antal Szerb (Budapest, 1901-Balf, 1944), a Jew who converted to Catholicism and was beaten to death in an extermination camp.