I receive about 35 pieces of spam a day, most of which are successfully filtered by the email client at my host provider, Modwest. Occasionally something gets through, usually Russian advertisements for discount electronics.

Got one today, however, which was a little different. The content of the message was as follows:

In a trice without warning the face of nature
grew sullen Black angry mouths, the clouds
swallowed up the sun The air was dense with
suppressed excitement The wind howled through
the long corridors and sobbed and whispered in
the secret recesses

Hmm. Not your average spam message.

A Google of the first line resulted in many many hits, most of which led toward spammed blogs and message boards, or people complaining about getting over-wrought, semi-literate poetry in their in-boxes. Again, nothing unusual there.

I was still intrigued, so I did a Google book search, which was a little more fruitful. Turns out this line is from page 12 of a book called My First Two Thousand Years, by George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge. It is a fictional autobiography of the Wandering Jew which was originally published in 1928, and is apparently still in print.

So now — although I am sure it was not the original intent of the spammer — I have another book on my reading list.

And I will leave the question of why this particular passage from that particular book found it way into an un-solicited email for another time.