Lets Read
speaker
7,275 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Lets Read’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.
Appearances
It wasn't in any phone books, and there was no notable people with that same name.
And even so, I made a note of both just in case I encountered them in the future.
But what I had worked out is that one of the few things Joe had taken with him when he disappeared was his collection of old, rare books.
Since they mattered to him that much, I thought that it'd be a good idea to contact rare book dealers around Denver, as well as the wider area to see if Joe had done any business with them.
I ticked off all the major players in the Denver area and then ticked off those in the surrounding states, and I even contacted a group of more specialist dealers as in those who dealt in pre-Islamic Arabic texts, but was told that not only had they never done business with a Joe, but the prices on some of the older and rarer texts could reach up to thirty grand.
It was little wonder his books were so precious to him, and I started to wonder if they were a little more relevant to the case than I first thought, as in, were his attempts at translating them just a symptom of whatever he was going through?
Or were they the cause?
Like I said, I had no luck with any of the rare book dealers I contacted, and it was then that the investigation started to slow.
I resorted to contacting churches as well as some of my old cop buddies to find out if there had been any similar encounters between Joe and members of the clergy, but again I had no luck.
This is all pre-internet too, so there was no looking somebody up online and if you wanted to look someone's criminal history up, you had to wait weeks after a phone call to get a letter in the mail.
I tried that too, by the way, and once again had no luck.
But it was during that barren period that I realized something about the numbers seven seven seven.
To cover all my bases and in the hopes of sparking a breakthrough, I rented a library book on pre-Islamic calligraphy and scripture.
I only got one thing out of it, but it was easily the most unsettling discovery I had made thus far.
There was always something that bothered me about the way Joe had written the number seven seven seven on the inside of his book.
Now the top line on the sevens looked almost curved, but since people quite often have unusual quirks in their handwriting, I didn't understand the significance right away.
But while reading through the book I came across a section on Arabic numbers.
It turns out they've had a huge influence on the numbers we still use today.
Their small circle zero is basically a precursor to our own oval shaped character, and their characters for one and nine are almost identical to the ones we use today.
Their number five is kind of like a U and then their number seven comes in a V shape.
Showing 281–300 of 7,275 · page 15 of 364
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