Over the past five years, the Almanac had become my bible. Like most books nowadays, it was only available in electronic format. But I’d wanted to be able to read the Almanac night or day, even during one of the stacks’ frequent power outages, so I’d fixed up an old discarded laser printer and used it to print out a hard copy. I put it in an old three-ring binder that I kept in my backpack and studied until I knew every word by heart.