Paper library in a pack of cards

A box the size and shape of a pack of playing cards, though slightly thicker, containing five dozen playing cards of the same size, shape and texture as standard playing cards. Each card is printed double-sided with a grid of characters, three dozen lines of two dozen columns, making five dozen zagier characters (one hundred and three thousand six hundred and eighty in decimal). This could be achieved in Marain style (RIP IMB) by using a four-by-five grid of black and white dots. Each character represents the entire text of a book. The first card contains the classics of literature, the second the top bestsellers of all time not included on the first card, the third the most significant non-fiction books and so forth. The characters can also be pronounced as strings of two consonant-vowel syllables, making the whole scheme somewhat like a Darmok-like language (as in Star Trek TNG). Each CV syllable represents a nine-bit integer corresponding to roughly half of the character.

When you read a book, if it is in some way important to you, you memorise the associated character, which automatically provides you with the word to pronounce it. You are therefore able to summarise Proust in a single word, for example, or quote the entire Bible. You can therefore carry the equivalent of a large city library in print in your pocket, and drop the text of probably most of the books you care to into your conversation. Pseuds can do this without having read the books. You can also use these words in other ways. For instance, you can use the word for "Nineteen Eighty-Four" to refer to what you feel is excessive surveillance or doublethink.

If you wish to refer to a specific passage, you use a string of words of this kind: the text of the book, the word number (make it a two dozen bit number, or a three-syllable word to be on the safe side) and the length of the passage in words as a second such number. It is therefore possible to use the words as a code for the English language by quoting single words from known books, though even a one-letter word would have eight syllables using that system.

Instead of reading a book, you pick a card from the pack, locate the appropriate character and read it, thereby experiencing the entire novel, treatise, textbook, biography or whatever you like in one pithy chunk.

An informed listener can then listen carefully to conversations and attempt to reconstruct the books from the way in which the words are used.