The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves. - Neal Stephenson

I began to dig into the history of the Fuggers. This was the third time in the short history of DODO that the name had unexpectedly come up. And even though they were a famous old banking family, this seemed like too many coincidences...
Even with the combined resources of Harvard's library system and U.S. intelligence databases, I wasn't able to find much. The medieval part of the story has been common knowledge for centuries...In 1459 the family had produced Jacob, the seventh surviving child in a large brood...who had, to make a long story short, become the richest person in the world... By 1601 the last central authority had been Markus Fugger: a patron of arts, a history buff, a collector of old artifacts, an ancient-languages geek... Athanasius Fugger was completely absent from the historical record.

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

The Police Minister’s toilet chided him