If you are trying to delete your Booktrovert account, here is the short, honest answer: there is nothing to delete. Booktrovert.org does not keep accounts. You did not make one, we did not store one, and there is no button to press. The thing you came here to close was never open, and also was never a thing.
We understand that is not a normal answer to a normal question, so we asked our founder, Doug, to explain it properly. Doug agreed, on the condition that he could do it from the lake. What follows is the transcript, taken down word for word. We have corrected nothing, including the loon.
DOUG: Is it going? Are we recording, or are you writing it down, or what is happening.
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: I'm writing it down.
DOUG: Good. Better. A machine would only make me self-conscious. All right. Somebody wrote in. They want to delete their account. And I want to help them, I do, but I have to start by taking something away from them, which is the account. There is no account. There has never been an account. There is the Ledger.
[a long pause]
DOUG: Are you writing "the Ledger."
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: I'm writing everything, Doug.
DOUG: The Ledger is a book. A real one, with a spine and a smell. It is green. There is a water stain on the cover in the rough shape of Ohio, which arrived in the flood of 1998 and has since been promoted to decoration. Every single person who has ever come to this website is written in that book, by hand, because in 1997 that was simply how you accounted for a person. You wrote their name. You did not process them. You wrote their name and then you got them a glass of water.
DOUG: Randy does the writing now. Randy has beautiful handwriting and a terrible attendance record, and somehow those have never once been a problem at the same time. He is not here today. He is, I want to say, at a wedding. He is often at a wedding. I have stopped asking whose.
[a loon]
DOUG: The strange part, and you can put this in, is how many of them arrive already certain they signed up for something. They did not sign up for anything. Nobody signs up here. There is no form, there is no welcome, there is a green book and a man at a wedding. And yet they turn up at the door with a particular look on their face, like they left a coat somewhere warm and this is the last place they remember being warm. I never know what to tell them except: sit down, there is water, the coat is not here but you are welcome to stay until you remember where it is.
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: They asked how to leave, though. Specifically.
DOUG: Right. Yes. If a person truly wants out of the Ledger, here is what we do, and I want the reader to hear that it is gentle. Randy finds your name. He does not erase it, because we do not own an eraser large enough for a person and would not use it if we did. He draws a line through it. One line. Not a scribble, not a scratch, a clean level line, the kind you would draw under a total you were proud of. Your name stays underneath, still readable, because leaving and vanishing are not the same act, and we have always taken the side of the record.
DOUG: And that is the whole deletion. That is the button. It is a man with good handwriting and a ruler, when he is not at the wedding.
[a long pause]
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: Doug, your shoes are getting wet.
DOUG: Tell them we were glad they came. Tell them the water is fine. Tell them that if they want to stay they never have to do anything at all, and if they want to go, the line will be a good clean line, and the book will still be green tomorrow.
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: Your shoes, Doug.
DOUG: The shoes are the lake's now.
[transcript ends]
So that is the procedure, such as it is. There is no confirmation email, because there was nothing to confirm and nobody at the desk to send it. If you got this far mostly wondering whether any of this is real, we once tried to settle that question ourselves in is Booktrovert legit, and if what you actually wanted was a login screen, we keep one on display over at the login page, strictly for the atmosphere.
The Ledger stays green. Your name stays legible. Please buy a book on your way past the water. Authors are fragile organisms, and Doug means it, even from the shore.
Dryly,
Booktrovert #842