Preview · Page 1 of 2
Meet the Book
This is the book’s own stage: Al Capone — from the frontispiece photograph of Pasley’s own book — stands on the stage, while Pasley’s 1930 biography is read aloud in Ryan’s voice: the barber-shop of the twenty-one shaving mugs, Colosimo and Torrio, the seizure of Cicero, and the beer wars at full blaze — and the labeled witnesses, Landesco and the newspapers of February 1929, speak in Alan’s voice, apart from the spine. The bookstore barcode rides every frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
Press Next to see everything that is inside the whole book.
Preview · Page 2 of 2
What’s Inside
- Pasley’s biography, Parts One–Four complete: Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man (1930) — the life of the Big Shot published while he still ruled Chicago, a year before the tax trial that destroyed him.
- About 6 hours 26 minutes of narration — Ryan reads the spine aloud in English, page by page, in a reading room you can follow with your eyes, while Capone’s portrait stands on the stage; the labeled witnesses are read in Alan’s voice.
- The Massacre, told three ways — by Pasley, by the era’s own photographic record (Chicago Gang Wars in Pictures, 1930), and by the newspapers America read the morning after; with Landesco’s McSwiggin assassination chapter as witness. Al Capone was never charged with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and no one ever was.
- The barcode rides every stage frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
These are the public-domain texts: Fred D. Pasley’s Al Capone (1930), John Landesco’s Organized Crime in Chicago (1929), Chicago Gang Wars in Pictures (1930), and the newspaper coverage of February 1929, presented as a talking hologram book. Every copy opens with an honest disclaimer that prints this book’s margin on its face: this house’s rule is to take an author’s words only when he has been dead a hundred years — Fred Pasley died in 1951, seventy-five years ago — and this one book proceeds on the copyright door, the 1930 biography being public domain in the United States by publication year. The narration is a synthesized English reading (Piper — Ryan, with Alan for the labeled witnesses) of these texts, made for this edition. Editor: Franklin Langston.
franklinlangston.gumroad.com/l/wjvsi
Point a camera at this barcode to come straight back to this bookstore — and pass it on.