You typed "booktrovert sweepstakes" into a search bar, and you arrived here, which is not where you meant to go. We get a lot of you. Sit down. There is a folding chair near the radiator, and the radiator is the warmest thing we own.
Here is the situation, plainly. The website you were looking for, booktrovert.com, runs a sweepstakes. You get seven days to enter. There is a real prize and a real drawing and, we assume, a real person who eventually receives a book in the mail and is happy about it. We think that's lovely. We mean that.
We also run a sweepstakes. Ours opened in 1997. It has not closed.
There is a slot. Doug built the slot. It is a mahogany box bolted to a support beam in the back room, with a brass plate that reads ENTRIES and a smaller brass plate beneath it that reads PLEASE. You write your name on a slip of paper, you fold it once, and you post it through the slot. That is the entire process. We have never improved it because Doug asked us not to, and then Doug left, and now nobody feels they have the standing.
You may enter as many times as you like. People do. There is a reader named Randy who enters daily and has for years. We have a drawer of slips that are simply the word RANDY in increasingly confident handwriting. We do not know where Randy gets the paper. We have stopped buying it.
This is the part people ask about. The drawing was scheduled for a date that the calendar in the break room does not contain. We have checked the calendar. It goes from one day to a different day with nothing in between, and the date we wrote down lives in the gap. Every year we agree to reschedule, and every year we discover the new date has also gone missing, which we now consider less a coincidence and more a feature of the building.
So no winner has been drawn. Not because we are withholding one. Because the moment of drawing keeps declining to occur.
The prize is a sealed envelope. It sits on a shelf above the slot, behind glass, lit by a small lamp that we leave on out of respect. Nobody currently employed here knows what is inside it. Doug knew. Doug is not reachable. The envelope is not heavy and it does not rattle, and once a year the Ghost of Mark Twain drifts past it, pauses, makes a sound like a kettle deciding against it, and moves on. We take that as confirmation that the prize is still in there and still worth winning.
Your odds are excellent, in the specific sense that they have never been calculated and therefore cannot be disproven. We invite you to find that comforting. Most of our visitors do, eventually, around the third hour.
It cannot be rigged. Rigging a sweepstakes requires a drawing, and we have already covered the drawing. If anything ours is the only sweepstakes in operation that is provably fair, on the grounds that nothing has ever happened to it. A few visitors have suggested Randy has already won and simply not told us. We find this unlikely, but we also find it hard to rule out, and on quiet afternoons it is the only thing anyone in the back room will talk about.
If you want a sweepstakes that closes, draws a name, and mails a real book to a real address, that is the one over at booktrovert.com, and you should go enter it, ideally before the seven days run out. We will not be offended. We measure time differently here and have not been offended since 1998.
If you stay, there is a slip and a pencil by the slot. Write your name. Fold it once. We will keep it with the others, in the warm dark, until the date that never comes. While you wait, the machines downstairs are technically a game, and we explained the whole haunted arcade already, and if you still aren't sure which Booktrovert you wandered into, we once compared the two of us at length. Either way, the envelope is real. Probably. We have a lamp on it.
Indefinitely,
Booktrovert #93