Let's explore this week's mystery: what happened to the book Inventio Fortunata - the Fortunate Discovery.

We'll knock out the first mystery right at the beginning: what is the Inventio Fortunata? At the heart, it's a lost book. It is a travelogue, written by a person who traveled to the Arctic in about 1360, found interesting things, wrote about the trip, and brought that book back to the King of England. But then, it went missing.

I'm a librarian, so I know that books do go missing. They are stolen, misshelved, accidentally weeded from a collection, hidden by ghosts - you just don't always know why things happen. Heck, a few episodes ago we talked about an entire library that is missing. But the idea that a book has been missing since the 1300s, with all of its content and ideas and information gone, is very frustrating to me! Let's see what we can figure out there, and get the whole picture.

You can read the Show Notes and check out all the links on our Patreon page.

This small mystery may be a little higher profile than some of our stories, but I was surprised when I stumbled over it. It is a true crime story, which is not really my genre of interest. But in this case, it's not so much the crime we're looking at, it's the people, the oddness of this story. And it's just the kind of story that I like: nobody gets hurt here, nobody dies (well, only of natural causes), and there are mysteries happening right in plain sight - that nobody really saw.

For all the show notes, including the many links that librarians love to share, head to our Patreon page.

The Pacific Northwest is an area that is extremely beautiful (famously so), filled with amazing trees, mountains all over the place, and some of the most stunning scenery you can imagine. The wilderness is dense, and it's easy to see how the legends of Bigfoot have spread across the area. Once you get into the trees, it's hard to see very far; but you know that all kinds of creatures are also in the woods with you. It can be unsettling.

In today's small mystery we are exploring the story of JC Brown, and what happened to him when he was exploring this area in 1904.