On the heels of Paul Collins’s wonderful Sixpence House, I’m reading Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism. (The paperback was released with a different subtitle: A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism, which is a more accurate description of the tone and content of the book than the hardcover subtitle). The book is both a memoir of Collins’s son’s diagnosis with autism and a history of the condition. Like everything Collins writes, it is full of ephemera and surprises, such as the case of a Henry Darger, a janitor with no friends or family whose oeuvre was unearthed by a landlord cleaning out the man’s apartment posthumously:

Lerner discovered dozens of mysterious volumes. The first find, hand-bound in fifteen volumes by Darger, was an epic novel: In the Realms of the Unreal. Written on Darger’s old manual typewriter, it is a staggering 15,145 pages long–the longest work of fiction in human history. A further three volumes contained hundreds of immense drawings to illustrate the book; some fold out to a full twelve feet in length. And alongside these discoveries, Lerner excavated yet another work: The History of My Life. Darger’s autobiography is a succinct 5,084 handwritten pages.

Lest you’re thinking of knocking Darger out of the Guiness Book, please be advised he spent 60 years writing In the Realms of the Unreal.